Adversarial Robustness of Phishing Email Detection: A Comparative Study of TF-IDF + Logistic Regression and Fine-Tuned DistilBERT
Phishing emails remain one of the most persistent cybersecurity threats, and machine-learning classifiers are widely used to detect them. Most reported detection accuracies, however, are measured on clean, in-distribution test data rather than on emails deliberately altered to evade detection. This paper reports a controlled, pairwise comparison of two phishing-detection approaches a TF-IDF + Logistic Regression baseline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT transformer trained on a unified corpus of 82,255 emails drawn from six public datasets and evaluated under three conditions: normal in-distribution, synthetic phishing, and adversarial phishing. Both models exceeded 98% accuracy on clean data ...
| Authors | Tanveer Ahmed, Seyedali Pourmoafil |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 20 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 August 2026 |
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