Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as computer-use
agents, autonomously performing tasks within real desktop or web environments.
While this evolution greatly expands practical use cases for humans, it also
creates serious security exposures. We present SUDO (Screen-based Universal
Detox2Tox Offense), a novel attack framework that systematically bypasses
refusal trained safeguards in commercial computer-use agents, such as Claude
Computer Use. The core mechanism, Detox2Tox, transforms harmful requests (that
agents initially reject) into seemingly benign requests via detoxification,
secures detailed instructions from advanced vision language models (VLMs), and
then reintroduces malicious content via toxification just before execution.
Unlike conventional jailbreaks, SUDO iteratively refines its attacks based on a
built-in refusal feedback, making it increasingly effective against robust
policy filters. In extensive tests spanning 50 real-world tasks and multiple
state-of-the-art VLMs, SUDO achieves a stark attack success rate of 24% (with
no refinement), and up to 41% (by its iterative refinement) in Claude Computer
Use. By revealing these vulnerabilities and demonstrating the ease with which
they can be exploited in real-world computing environments, this paper
highlights an immediate need for robust, context-aware safeguards. WARNING:
This paper includes harmful or offensive model outputs.