SecureLearn -- An Attack-agnostic Defense for Multiclass Machine Learning Against Data Poisoning Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Paracha, Anum, Arshad, Junaid, Farah, Mohamed Ben, Ismail, Khalid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915579018870784
author Paracha, Anum
Arshad, Junaid
Farah, Mohamed Ben
Ismail, Khalid
author_facet Paracha, Anum
Arshad, Junaid
Farah, Mohamed Ben
Ismail, Khalid
contents Data poisoning attacks are a potential threat to machine learning (ML) models, aiming to manipulate training datasets to disrupt their performance. Existing defenses are mostly designed to mitigate specific poisoning attacks or are aligned with particular ML algorithms. Furthermore, most defenses are developed to secure deep neural networks or binary classifiers. However, traditional multiclass classifiers need attention to be secure from data poisoning attacks, as these models are significant in developing multi-modal applications. Therefore, this paper proposes SecureLearn, a two-layer attack-agnostic defense to defend multiclass models from poisoning attacks. It comprises two components of data sanitization and a new feature-oriented adversarial training. To ascertain the effectiveness of SecureLearn, we proposed a 3D evaluation matrix with three orthogonal dimensions: data poisoning attack, data sanitization and adversarial training. Benchmarking SecureLearn in a 3D matrix, a detailed analysis is conducted at different poisoning levels (10%-20%), particularly analysing accuracy, recall, F1-score, detection and correction rates, and false discovery rate. The experimentation is conducted for four ML algorithms, namely Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained with three public datasets, against three poisoning attacks and compared with two existing mitigations. Our results highlight that SecureLearn is effective against the provided attacks. SecureLearn has strengthened resilience and adversarial robustness of traditional multiclass models and neural networks, confirming its generalization beyond algorithm-specific defenses. It consistently maintained accuracy above 90%, recall and F1-score above 75%. For neural networks, SecureLearn achieved 97% recall and F1-score against all selected poisoning attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22274
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SecureLearn -- An Attack-agnostic Defense for Multiclass Machine Learning Against Data Poisoning Attacks
Paracha, Anum
Arshad, Junaid
Farah, Mohamed Ben
Ismail, Khalid
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Data poisoning attacks are a potential threat to machine learning (ML) models, aiming to manipulate training datasets to disrupt their performance. Existing defenses are mostly designed to mitigate specific poisoning attacks or are aligned with particular ML algorithms. Furthermore, most defenses are developed to secure deep neural networks or binary classifiers. However, traditional multiclass classifiers need attention to be secure from data poisoning attacks, as these models are significant in developing multi-modal applications. Therefore, this paper proposes SecureLearn, a two-layer attack-agnostic defense to defend multiclass models from poisoning attacks. It comprises two components of data sanitization and a new feature-oriented adversarial training. To ascertain the effectiveness of SecureLearn, we proposed a 3D evaluation matrix with three orthogonal dimensions: data poisoning attack, data sanitization and adversarial training. Benchmarking SecureLearn in a 3D matrix, a detailed analysis is conducted at different poisoning levels (10%-20%), particularly analysing accuracy, recall, F1-score, detection and correction rates, and false discovery rate. The experimentation is conducted for four ML algorithms, namely Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained with three public datasets, against three poisoning attacks and compared with two existing mitigations. Our results highlight that SecureLearn is effective against the provided attacks. SecureLearn has strengthened resilience and adversarial robustness of traditional multiclass models and neural networks, confirming its generalization beyond algorithm-specific defenses. It consistently maintained accuracy above 90%, recall and F1-score above 75%. For neural networks, SecureLearn achieved 97% recall and F1-score against all selected poisoning attacks.
title SecureLearn -- An Attack-agnostic Defense for Multiclass Machine Learning Against Data Poisoning Attacks
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22274