Beyond Boundaries: A Comprehensive Survey of Transferable Attacks on AI Systems

Abstract

Transferable attacks allow adversarial manipulations or learned attack mechanisms constructed in one setting to compromise other AI systems, potentially reducing attack costs and amplifying security and privacy risks. Yet fragmented terminology and evaluation practices hinder understanding of what transfers, why it transfers, and where transfer fails. This survey synthesizes representative research and develops a unified taxonomy spanning six complementary axes: cross-instance, cross-domain, cross-modality, cross-model, cross-task, and cross-deployment. By separating source-target configuration changes from attacker access and adaptation budgets, the taxonomy provides a common framework for comparing transfer across evasion, poisoning, backdoors, privacy inference, model stealing, and prompt-based attacks. We connect transfer mechanisms, including gradient alignment, shared representations, training persistence, and deployment invariances, to enhancement methods based on augmentation, disentanglement, and optimization. Our synthesis identifies inconsistent transfer, incompatible metrics, and gaps between simulated and physical evaluations, and establishes a research agenda for compositional transfer, configuration differences, temporal persistence, and reproducible benchmarking. Together, this work supports systematic investigation of shared vulnerabilities and guides transfer-aware security assessment and defense.