# Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks: Reliable Attacks Against Black-Box Machine Learning Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 462 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 462)

- [Unsolved Problems in ML Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13916/) (2021)
- [Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks through Variance Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15571/) (2021)
- [On the Robustness of Vision Transformers to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02610/) (2021)
- [Feature Importance-aware Transferable Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14185/) (2021)
- [Advances in adversarial attacks and defenses in computer vision: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00401/) (2021)
- [Anti-DreamBooth: Protecting users from personalized text-to-image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15433/) (2023)
- [Shadows can be Dangerous: Stealthy and Effective Physical-world Adversarial Attack by Natural Phenomenon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03818/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Imperceptible and Transferable Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08192/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Sticker: A Stealthy Attack Method in the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06728/) (2021)
- [Improving Adversarial Transferability via Neuron Attribution-Based Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00008/) (2022)
- [Parallel Rectangle Flip Attack: A Query-based Black-box Attack against Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08970/) (2022)
- [A Pilot Study of Query-Free Adversarial Attack against Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16378/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Membership Inference Attacks by Self-Distillation Through a Novel Ensemble Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08324/) (2021)
- [How Deep Learning Sees the World: A Survey on Adversarial Attacks & Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10862/) (2023)
- [Black Box Adversarial Prompting for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04237/) (2023)
- [Structure Invariant Transformation for better Adversarial Transferability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14700/) (2023)
- [Query-Based Adversarial Prompt Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12329/) (2024)
- [T-SEA: Transfer-based Self-Ensemble Attack on Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09773/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Robustness Comparison of Vision Transformer and MLP-Mixer to CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02797/) (2021)
- [Meta Gradient Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04204/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Example Detection for DNN Models: A Review and Experimental Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00203/) (2021)
- [Shape-invariant 3D Adversarial Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04041/) (2022)
- [Improving the Transferability of Targeted Adversarial Examples through Object-Based Diverse Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09123/) (2022)
- [Erasing Undesirable Concepts in Diffusion Models with Adversarial Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15618/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Attacks On Multi-Agent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06560/) (2021)
- [Triangle Attack: A Query-efficient Decision-based Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06569/) (2021)
- [Boosting Adversarial Transferability by Achieving Flat Local Maxima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05225/) (2023)
- [Exploring Adversarial Robustness of Multi-Sensor Perception Systems in Self Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06784/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Attacks for Tabular Data: Application to Fraud Detection and Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08030/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Robust Adversarial Training in Pattern Recognition: Fundamental, Theory, and Methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14046/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to almost imperceptible perturbations of their inputs. So far it was unclear how much risk adversarial perturbations carry for the safety of real-world machine learning applications because most methods used to generate such perturbations rely either on detailed model information (gradient-based attacks) or on confidence scores such as class probabilities (score-based attacks), neither of which are available in most real-world scenarios. In many such cases one currently needs to retreat to transfer-based attacks which rely on cumbersome substitute models, need access to the training data and can be defended against. Here we emphasise the importance of attacks which solely rely on the final model decision. Such decision-based attacks are (1) applicable to real-world black-box models such as autonomous cars, (2) need less knowledge and are easier to apply than transfer-based attacks and (3) are more robust to simple defences than gradient- or score-based attacks. Previous attacks in this category were limited to simple models or simple datasets. Here we introduce the Boundary Attack, a decision-based attack that starts from a large adversarial perturbation and then seeks to reduce the perturbation while staying adversarial. The attack is conceptually simple, requires close to no hyperparameter tuning, does not rely on substitute models and is competitive with the best gradient-based attacks in standard computer vision tasks like ImageNet. We apply the attack on two black-box algorithms from Clarifai.com. The Boundary Attack in particular and the class of decision-based attacks in general open new avenues to study the robustness of machine learning models and raise new questions regarding the safety of deployed machine learning systems. An implementation of the attack is available as part of Foolbox at https://github.com/bethgelab/foolbox .