# Boundary Defense Against Black-box Adversarial Attacks

Source: [Boundary Defense Against Black-box Adversarial Attacks](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6bbc1e209131cea2fffd>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:56:05.140Z

Authors: Manjushree B. Aithal, Xiaohua Li

Published: 2022-01-31T18:56:05.000Z

## Abstract

Black-box adversarial attacks generate adversarial samples via iterative optimizations using repeated queries. Defending deep neural networks against such attacks has been challenging. In this paper, we propose an efficient Boundary Defense (BD) method which mitigates black-box attacks by exploiting the fact that the adversarial optimizations often need samples on the classification boundary. Our method detects the boundary samples as those with low classification confidence and adds white Gaussian noise to their logits. The method's impact on the deep network's classification accuracy is analyzed theoretically. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the BD method can reliably defend against both soft and hard label black-box attacks. It outperforms a list of existing defense methods. For IMAGENET models, by adding zero-mean white Gaussian noise with standard deviation 0.1 to logits when the classification confidence is less than 0.3, the defense reduces the attack success rate to almost 0 while limiting the classification accuracy degradation to around 1 percent.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13444>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.13444.pdf>)
