Adversarial Attacks and Robustness in SMS Spam Classification Models

Short Message Service (SMS) spam classification systems based on machine learning and deep learning have achieved high accuracy under standard evaluation settings; however, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses significant risks to real-world deployment. Attacks on SMS spam classifiers are realized as precision-level adversarial examples, where carefully crafted perturbations (e.g., character substitution/reordering, word disguising and synonym injection, benign token insertion) maintain human readability while drawing models to misclassify. In this paper, we study universal adversarial attacks on SMS spam clasification models and their adaptation to various feature representations and learning architectures: from classic machine learning models to deep neural networks and transformer-based solutions. And it introduces defense terms like adversarial training, data augmentation, ensemble learning, input sanitization and defensive distillation. Primary challenges such as trade-offs between robustness and accuracy, language diversity, and limited computation in mobile contexts are considered. The findings of the paper show possible future research challenges worth addressing for building robust SMS spam detection systems that are still performing effectively under adversarial conditions.