# SecureSense: Defending Adversarial Attack for Secure Device-Free Human Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09984/) (2020)
- [Threat of Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00553/) (2018)
- [Defense-GAN: Protecting Classifiers Against Adversarial Attacks Using Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06605/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Examples: Attacks and Defenses for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07107/) (2017)
- [MagNet: a Two-Pronged Defense against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09064/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Logit Pairing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06373/) (2018)
- [Efficient Decision-based Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04433/) (2019)
- [Improving the Robustness of Deep Neural Networks via Stability Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04326/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Deep Learning for Over-the-Air Spectrum Poisoning Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00500/) (2019)
- [Suppressing Mislabeled Data via Grouping and Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15603/) (2020)
- [When Attackers Meet AI: Learning-empowered Attacks in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01430/) (2019)
- [Defending against Adversarial Attack towards Deep Neural Networks via Collaborative Multi-task Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05123/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SenseFi: A Library and Benchmark on Deep-Learning-Empowered WiFi Human Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07859/) (2022)
- [TENT: Connect Language Models with IoT Sensors for Zero-Shot Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08245/) (2023)
- [AutoFi: Towards Automatic WiFi Human Sensing via Geometric Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01629/) (2022)
- [AirFi: Empowering WiFi-based Passive Human Gesture Recognition to Unseen Environment via Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10285/) (2022)
- [MaskFi: Unsupervised Learning of WiFi and Vision Representations for Multimodal Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19258/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Attacks Against Deep Learning-Based Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12002/) (2025)
- [Towards Trustworthy Wi-Fi CSI-based Sensing: Systematic Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20456/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks have empowered accurate device-free human activity recognition, which has wide applications. Deep models can extract robust features from various sensors and generalize well even in challenging situations such as data-insufficient cases. However, these systems could be vulnerable to input perturbations, i.e. adversarial attacks. We empirically demonstrate that both black-box Gaussian attacks and modern adversarial white-box attacks can render their accuracies to plummet. In this paper, we firstly point out that such phenomenon can bring severe safety hazards to device-free sensing systems, and then propose a novel learning framework, SecureSense, to defend common attacks. SecureSense aims to achieve consistent predictions regardless of whether there exists an attack on its input or not, alleviating the negative effect of distribution perturbation caused by adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly enhance the model robustness of existing deep models, overcoming possible attacks. The results validate that our method works well on wireless human activity recognition and person identification systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to investigate adversarial attacks and further develop a novel defense framework for wireless human activity recognition in mobile computing research.