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HFEPX · Eval paper review

RedTeamCUA: Realistic Adversarial Testing of Computer-Use Agents in Hybrid Web-OS Environments

Zeyi Liao, Jaylen Jones, Linxi Jiang, Yuting Ning +4 more

Published

May 28, 2025

Citations

0

Trust level

High

Usefulness score

65/100 (Medium)

Extraction confidence

80% (High)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Feb 16, 2026

Open arXiv Find implementation Shortlist (0) RSS feed

Tags

Automatic Metrics General Red Team Web Browsing

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Use this as a practical starting point for protocol research, then validate against the original paper.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Human feedback signal
Detected
From extracted signals
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
65/100
Moderate-confidence candidate

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here

Human Eval Papers LLM-as-Judge Papers Pairwise Preference Papers Tool-Use Evaluation Search

Abstract

Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection. Current evaluations of this threat either lack support realistic but controlled environments or ignore hybrid web-OS attack scenarios involving both interfaces. To address this, we propose RedTeamCUA, an adversarial testing framework featuring a novel hybrid sandbox that integrates a VM-based OS environment with Docker-based web platforms. Our sandbox supports key features tailored for red teaming, such as flexible adversarial scenario configuration, and a setting that decouples adversarial evaluation from navigational limitations of CUAs by initializing tests directly at the point of an adversarial injection. Using RedTeamCUA, we develop RTC-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with 864 examples that investigate realistic, hybrid web-OS attack scenarios and fundamental security vulnerabilities. Benchmarking current frontier CUAs identifies significant vulnerabilities: Claude 3.7 Sonnet | CUA demonstrates an ASR of 42.9%, while Operator, the most secure CUA evaluated, still exhibits an ASR of 7.6%. Notably, CUAs often attempt to execute adversarial tasks with an Attempt Rate as high as 92.5%, although failing to complete them due to capability limitations. Nevertheless, we observe concerning high ASRs in realistic end-to-end settings, with the strongest-to-date Claude 4.5 Sonnet | CUA exhibiting the highest ASR of 60%, indicating that CUA threats can already result in tangible risks to users and computer systems. Overall, RedTeamCUA provides an essential framework for advancing realistic, controlled, and systematic analysis of CUA vulnerabilities, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses to indirect prompt injection prior to real-world deployment.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Red Team

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Rtc Bench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"Using RedTeamCUA, we develop RTC-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with 864 examples that investigate realistic, hybrid web-OS attack scenarios and fundamental security vulnerabilities."

Reported Metrics

strong

Jailbreak success rate

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection."

Benchmarks and datasets

Rtc-Bench

Reported metrics

jailbreak success rate
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
Yes
Feedback types
Red Team
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
General
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval
Web Browsing
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
High
Use this page as
Secondary protocol comparison source

Research brief

Metadata summary

Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection.
  • Current evaluations of this threat either lack support realistic but controlled environments or ignore hybrid web-OS attack scenarios involving both interfaces.
  • To address this, we propose RedTeamCUA, an adversarial testing framework featuring a novel hybrid sandbox that integrates a VM-based OS environment with Docker-based web platforms.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Simulation environment) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • To address this, we propose RedTeamCUA, an adversarial testing framework featuring a novel hybrid sandbox that integrates a VM-based OS environment with Docker-based web platforms.
  • Using RedTeamCUA, we develop RTC-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with 864 examples that investigate realistic, hybrid web-OS attack scenarios and fundamental security vulnerabilities.
  • Benchmarking current frontier CUAs identifies significant vulnerabilities: Claude 3.7 Sonnet | CUA demonstrates an ASR of 42.9%, while Operator, the most secure CUA evaluated, still exhibits an ASR of 7.6%.

Why it matters for eval

  • Using RedTeamCUA, we develop RTC-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with 864 examples that investigate realistic, hybrid web-OS attack scenarios and fundamental security vulnerabilities.
  • Benchmarking current frontier CUAs identifies significant vulnerabilities: Claude 3.7 Sonnet | CUA demonstrates an ASR of 42.9%, while Operator, the most secure CUA evaluated, still exhibits an ASR of 7.6%.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Red Team

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Rtc-Bench

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: jailbreak success rate