Defense Against Adversarial Attacks: Foundations, Strategies, and Future Directions
Preprint
- 14 July 2026
- preprint
- Published by MDPI AG in Preprints.org
Abstract
Adversarial machine learning is an important area of research in computer science, focusing on understanding and mitigating attacks that make use of the vulnerabilities of machine learning models. In such attacks, adversaries aim to exploit these vulnerabilities in order to harm model's utility or violate its privacy or availability. These attacks include evasion, poisoning, exploratory, and explainability. Evasion, poisoning, and explainability attacks aim to harm the models' utility, while exploratory attacks violate the privacy of the models. To reduce the negative impacts of these attacks, a plethora of defense mechanisms have been proposed. In this survey, we review a substantial body of works and propose a comprehensive and novel taxonomy of defense strategies. We divide defense systems into eight main categories including: training-based, architecture-based, uncertainty-based, detection-based, optimization-based, transformation-based, information-theoretic, and hybrid approaches. For each category, we analyze and summarize key techniques and algorithms. Moreover, we investigate the limitations associated with these defenses, such as model generalization, robustness-accuracy trade-off, and adaptability challenges. By highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of existing defenses, this survey aims to enlighten future research towards more robust and efficient adversarial defense mechanisms.Keywords
All Related Versions
This publication has 92 references indexed in Scilit:
- Unveiling vulnerabilities in deep learning-based malware detection: Differential privacy driven adversarial attacksComputers & Security, 2024
- CardioDefense: Defending against adversarial attack in ECG classification with adversarial distillation trainingBiomedical Signal Processing and Control, 2024
- Apollon: A robust defense system against Adversarial Machine Learning attacks in Intrusion Detection SystemsComputers & Security, 2023
- Certifiably robust interpretation via Rényi differential privacyArtificial Intelligence, 2022
- Survey on federated learning threats: Concepts, taxonomy on attacks and defences, experimental study and challengesInformation Fusion, 2022
- Feature autoencoder for detecting adversarial examplesInternational Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2022
- Hardening machine learning denial of service (DoS) defences against adversarial attacks in IoT smart home networksComputers & Security, 2021
- Adversarial Attacks and Defenses in Deep LearningEngineering, 2020
- A taxonomy and survey of attacks against machine learningComputer Science Review, 2019
- A survey of game theoretic approach for adversarial machine learningWIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2018