A Novel Adversarial Gray-Box Attack on DCT-based Face Deepfake Detectors







Francesco Guarnera1, Luca Guarnera1, Alessandro Ortis1, Sebastiano Battiato1, Giovanni Puglisi2
1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy
2 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Cagliari, Italy
francesco.guarnera@unict.it, luca.guarnera@unict.it, alessandro.ortis@unict.it, sebastiano.battiato@unict.it, puglisi@unica.it

IEEE ACCESS









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Basic solution pipeline. The vectors of features (i.e., the β values related to AC modes) are computed from both real (IR)
and fake (IF) images respectively. Element-wise ratio between feature vectors is computed (qi values) and employed
to rescale the DCT values computed from IF. The final adversarial fake image I'F is then obtained by applying the
IDCT to the rescaled DCT values.



ABSTRACT


In recent years, several techniques have been developed to detect deepfake images, with particular success of approaches that exploit analytical traces (e.g. frequency domain features), such as those derived from the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Despite their effectiveness, these detectors remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we introduce a novel gray-box adversarial attack specifically designed to evade DCT-based deepfake detectors. Our method accurately tunes the AC coefficient statistics of synthetic images to closely match those of real ones, while preserving high visual quality. The attack assumes full knowledge of the DCT feature extraction process, but not access to the internal parameters of the classifiers. We evaluate the proposed method against a set of DCT-based detectors using deepfakes generated from both Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs). Experimental results show significant degradation in detection performance, exposing critical weaknesses in systems traditionally considered interpretable and robust. This work raises important concerns about the reliability of frequency domain detectors in forensic and cybersecurity applications.






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Cite:
@article{guarnera2025novel,
   title={A Novel Adversarial Gray-Box Attack on DCT-Based Face Deepfake Detectors},
   author={Guarnera, Francesco and Guarnera, Luca and Ortis, Alessandro and Battiato, Sebastiano and Puglisi, Giovanni},
   journal={IEEE Access},
   year={2025},
   publisher={IEEE}
}





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