Smudged Fingerprints: A Systematic Evaluation of the Robustness of AI Image Fingerprints

Model fingerprint detection techniques have emerged as a promising approach for attributing AI-generated images to their source models, but their robustness under adversarial conditions remains largely unexplored. We present the first systematic security evaluation of these techniques, formalizing threat models that encompass both white- and black-box access and two attack goals: fingerprint removal, which erases identifying traces to evade attribution, and fingerprint forgery, which seeks to cause misattribution to a target model. We implement five attack strategies and evaluate 14 representative fingerprinting methods across RGB, frequency, and learned-feature domains on 12 state-of-the-art image generators. Our experiments reveal a pronounced gap between clean and adversarial performance. Removal attacks are highly effective, often achieving success rates above 80% in white-box settings and over 50% under constrained black-box access. While forgery is more challenging than removal, its success significantly varies across targeted models. We also identify a utility-robustness trade-off: methods with the highest attribution accuracy are often vulnerable to attacks. Although some techniques exhibit robustness in specific settings, none achieves high robustness and accuracy across all evaluated threat models. These findings highlight the need for techniques balancing robustness and accuracy, and identify the most promising approaches for advancing this goal.