An Investigation of Large Language Models and Their Vulnerabilities in Spam Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tang, Qiyao, Li, Xiangyang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Tang, Qiyao
Li, Xiangyang
author_facet Tang, Qiyao
Li, Xiangyang
contents Spam messages continue to present significant challenges to digital users, cluttering inboxes and posing security risks. Traditional spam detection methods, including rules-based, collaborative, and machine learning approaches, struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving tactics employed by spammers. This project studies new spam detection systems that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned with spam datasets. More importantly, we want to understand how LLM-based spam detection systems perform under adversarial attacks that purposefully modify spam emails and data poisoning attacks that exploit the differences between the training data and the massages in detection, to which traditional machine learning models are shown to be vulnerable. This experimentation employs two LLM models of GPT2 and BERT and three spam datasets of Enron, LingSpam, and SMSspamCollection for extensive training and testing tasks. The results show that, while they can function as effective spam filters, the LLM models are susceptible to the adversarial and data poisoning attacks. This research provides very useful insights for future applications of LLM models for information security.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09776
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Investigation of Large Language Models and Their Vulnerabilities in Spam Detection
Tang, Qiyao
Li, Xiangyang
Cryptography and Security
Spam messages continue to present significant challenges to digital users, cluttering inboxes and posing security risks. Traditional spam detection methods, including rules-based, collaborative, and machine learning approaches, struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving tactics employed by spammers. This project studies new spam detection systems that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned with spam datasets. More importantly, we want to understand how LLM-based spam detection systems perform under adversarial attacks that purposefully modify spam emails and data poisoning attacks that exploit the differences between the training data and the massages in detection, to which traditional machine learning models are shown to be vulnerable. This experimentation employs two LLM models of GPT2 and BERT and three spam datasets of Enron, LingSpam, and SMSspamCollection for extensive training and testing tasks. The results show that, while they can function as effective spam filters, the LLM models are susceptible to the adversarial and data poisoning attacks. This research provides very useful insights for future applications of LLM models for information security.
title An Investigation of Large Language Models and Their Vulnerabilities in Spam Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09776