arXiv subjects

Zidong Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zidong Zhang.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

(A)I Sees What You Don't: Exploiting New Attack Surfaces in Third-Party Mobile Agents

Third-party mobile agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for automating smartphone interactions. These agents act as high-privilege decision-makers, perceiving device states through screenshots and executing actions via VLM reasoning, transforming how an agent app interacts with the environment (i.e., other apps or the OS). Correspondingly, this transformation introduces new attack surfaces or transforms benign/harmless interfaces into exploitable ones for mobile devices. In this paper, we summarize key differences between third-party mobile agent apps and general apps when interacting with the environment, analyze the security posture of agents, and identify two unique attack surfaces compared to general mobile apps: the Screen Perception Attack Surface, which exploits the gap between human and machine vision, and the Misused Channel Attack Surface, which intercepts or manipulates the agent's execution pipeline. We design and implement seven concrete attacks, from subliminal text injection and invisible pixel zone exploitation to screenshot tampering and host PC command injection. Our evaluation of five popular mobile agent frameworks demonstrates that a malicious app can hijack agent actions and achieve arbitrary command execution even without any privilege permissions, while remaining visually indistinguishable to users. These findings reveal a fundamental trust mismatch in autonomous agent design and highlight the urgent need for perception-aware security models on multi-tenant platforms.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Mini-Programs, Mega-Problems: Unveiling OAuth-based Authentication Misuses in Mini-Programs via Dynamic Analysis

Mini-programs have become a dominant paradigm for lightweight application deployment within super apps such as WeChat. To support seamless integration, super apps provide OAuth mechanisms for user login. However, improper integration of OAuth-based Authentication (OBA) flows by third-party developers can lead to critical security flaws. In this paper, we discover three new types of runtime OBA misuses that differ from prior static-code-based studies, enabling attackers to impersonate victims. To assess their real-world impact, we design and implement MINIAUTH, the first analysis framework for systematically analyzing OBA misuse at scale. MINIAUTH automatically pinpoints the OBA login page of a mini-program, executes the workflow dynamically, and analyzes its runtime behaviors. This enables it to handle obfuscated mini-programs and uncover vulnerabilities that existing approaches cannot detect. Applying MINIAUTH to 44,273 WeChat and 2,721 Baidu mini-programs, we uncover 1,834 misuse cases, including critical logic flaws that enable client-side identity forgery via exposed credentials and authentication bypass through static or plaintext identifiers. Our cross-platform evaluation further shows that such misuses are not confined to a single ecosystem but consistently appear across different mini-program platforms. We also identify a cryptographic design flaw in Baidu's OBA APIs that allows brute-forcing of session keys. We responsibly disclosed our findings to the developers and platforms, receiving acknowledgments and assigned CNVD/CNNVD IDs. These results underscore the need for more robust developer guidance and enhanced platform-level safeguards.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Your Space is My Zone: Demystifying the Security Risks of AI-Powered Applications on Pre-Trained Model Hubs

AI-powered Applications (AI-Apps), hosted on platforms such as Hugging Face, are democratizing access to pre-trained models through online inference and fine-tuning services. While lowering AI adoption barriers, these platforms introduce an unexplored attack surface, as AI-Apps are often developed by untrusted parties with weak isolation and misconfigured security settings. In this paper, we present the first systematic security analysis of AI-Apps across three leading platforms. To structure our investigation, we map the AI-App lifecycle to established risk taxonomies (e.g., OWASP), identifying five threat categories and ten attack vectors ranging from generic web flaws to high-impact architectural issues. Our analysis reveals critical failures including broken access control, insecure resource reuse, insufficient input validation, and sensitive data exposure. Notably, we uncover three novel architectural vulnerabilities inherent to platform design and demonstrate how traditional issues (e.g., world-readable logs) are uniquely amplified in this ecosystem. To assess real-world impact, we develop an analysis framework Insightor and apply it to over 970,000 public AI-Apps. Alarmingly, we find thousands of apps leaking credentials, hundreds containing input injection vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution, and tens harboring embedded backdoors -- indicating active exploitation. We have responsibly disclosed all findings to the affected platforms and developers.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

CLFEC: A New Task for Unified Linguistic and Factual Error Correction in paragraph-level Chinese Professional Writing

Chinese text correction has traditionally focused on spelling and grammar, while factual error correction is usually treated separately. However, in paragraph-level Chinese professional writing, linguistic (word/grammar/punctuation) and factual errors frequently co-occur and interact, while many draft-level errors are sparsely observable in published texts after editorial review, making unified correction both necessary and controlled benchmark construction essential. This paper introduces CLFEC (Chinese Linguistic \& Factual Error Correction), a new task for joint linguistic and factual correction. We construct a mixed, multi-domain Chinese professional writing dataset spanning current affairs, finance, law, and medicine. We then conduct a systematic study of LLM-based correction paradigms, from prompting to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic workflows. The analysis reveals practical challenges, including limited generalization of specialized correction models, the need for evidence grounding for factual repair, the difficulty of mixed-error paragraphs, and over-correction on clean inputs. Results further show that handling linguistic and factual errors within the same context outperforms decoupled pipelines, and that agentic workflows can be effective with suitable backbone models. Overall, CLFEC provides a new benchmark for Chinese text correction research and practical guidance for proofreading systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Topological Lattice Metamaterials -- A Platform For Novel Electromagnetic Material Design Based On An Artificial Topological "Atom"

In nature, most materials are composed of atoms with periodic structures. Hence, it's impossible to introduce topological structures into their lattice compose, because the atoms as basic blocks cannot be modulated. However, the lattice compose of metamaterials can be designed conveniently. In our work, we propose to introduce topological non-trivial structures, Mobius unknots, as the basic block (the artificial chiral "atoms") to design metamaterials. A 5.95 GHz intrinsic peak, in addition to the electrical resonance peak near 11 GHz on the transmission coefficient spectrum was confirmed by theoretical calculations, finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations and experiments when electromagnetic waves transfer to a chiral Mobius unknot. Theoretical analysis indicates that this intrinsic peak originates from the phase transition caused by the electromagnetic waves propagate along the Mobius unknot non-trivial structure. It is similar to the state of spin-splitting of electron levels. Take the artificial chiral "atoms" - Mobius unknots as the basic block, we can construct two-dimensional and even three-dimensional ordered metamaterials. The simulation and experimental results showed that the response to electromagnetic wave in the GHz band can be modulated by the coupling between the periodic potential and the spin-like of energy levels.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗