AgentRAE: Remote Action Execution through Notification-based Visual Backdoors against Screenshots-based Mobile GUI Agents

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 24 Mar 2026] AgentRAE: Remote Action Execution through Notification-based Visual Backdoors against Screenshots-based Mobile GUI Agents Yutao Luo, Haotian Zhu, Shuchao Pang, Zhigang Lu, Tian Dong, Yongbin Zhou, Minhui Xue The rapid adoption of mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents, which autonomously control applications and operating systems (OS), exposes new system-level attack surfaces. Existing backdoors against web GUI agents and general GenAI models rely on environmental injection or deceptive pop-ups to mislead the agent operation. However, these techniques do not work on screenshots-based mobile GUI agents due to the challenges of restricted trigger design spaces, OS background interference, and conflicts in multiple trigger-action mappings. We propose AgentRAE, a novel backdoor attack capable of inducing Remote Action Execution in mobile GUI agents using visually natural triggers (e.g., benign app icons in notifications). To address the underfitting caused by natural triggers and achieve accurate multi-target action redirection, we design a novel two-stage pipeline that first enhances the agent's sensitivity to subtle iconographic differences via contrastive learning, and then associates each trigger with a specific mobile GUI agent action through a backdoor post-training. Our extensive evaluation reveals that the proposed backdoor preserves clean performance with an attack success rate of over 90% across ten mobile operations. Furthermore, it is hard to visibly detect the benign-looking triggers and circumvents eight representative state-of-the-art defenses. These results expose an overlooked backdoor vector in mobile GUI agents, underscoring the need for defenses that scrutinize notification-conditioned behaviors and internal agent representations. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.23007 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.23007v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.23007 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Zhigang Lu [view email] [v1] Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:51:43 UTC (4,996 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)