Complete Evasion, Zero Modification: PDF Attacks on AI Text Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Creo, Aldan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Creo, Aldan
author_facet Creo, Aldan
contents AI-generated text detectors have become essential tools for maintaining content authenticity, yet their robustness against evasion attacks remains questionable. We present PDFuzz, a novel attack that exploits the discrepancy between visual text layout and extraction order in PDF documents. Our method preserves exact textual content while manipulating character positioning to scramble extraction sequences. We evaluate this approach against the ArguGPT detector using a dataset of human and AI-generated text. Our results demonstrate complete evasion: detector performance drops from (93.6 $\pm$ 1.4) % accuracy and 0.938 $\pm$ 0.014 F1 score to random-level performance ((50.4 $\pm$ 3.2) % accuracy, 0.0 F1 score) while maintaining perfect visual fidelity. Our work reveals a vulnerability in current detection systems that is inherent to PDF document structures and underscores the need for implementing sturdy safeguards against such attacks. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ACMCMC/PDFuzz.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01887
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Complete Evasion, Zero Modification: PDF Attacks on AI Text Detection
Creo, Aldan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
AI-generated text detectors have become essential tools for maintaining content authenticity, yet their robustness against evasion attacks remains questionable. We present PDFuzz, a novel attack that exploits the discrepancy between visual text layout and extraction order in PDF documents. Our method preserves exact textual content while manipulating character positioning to scramble extraction sequences. We evaluate this approach against the ArguGPT detector using a dataset of human and AI-generated text. Our results demonstrate complete evasion: detector performance drops from (93.6 $\pm$ 1.4) % accuracy and 0.938 $\pm$ 0.014 F1 score to random-level performance ((50.4 $\pm$ 3.2) % accuracy, 0.0 F1 score) while maintaining perfect visual fidelity. Our work reveals a vulnerability in current detection systems that is inherent to PDF document structures and underscores the need for implementing sturdy safeguards against such attacks. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ACMCMC/PDFuzz.
title Complete Evasion, Zero Modification: PDF Attacks on AI Text Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01887