Detecting adversarial attacks on random samples

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of detecting adversarial perturbations in a sequence of observations. Given a data sample $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ drawn from a standard normal distribution, an adversary, after observing the sample, can perturb each observation by a fixed magnitude or leave it unchanged. We explore the relationship between the perturbation magnitude, the sparsity of the perturbation, and the detectability of the adversary's actions, establishing precise thresholds for when detection becomes impossible.