Defenses against adversarial examples, such as adversarial training, are
typically tailored to a single perturbation type (e.g., small
$\ell_\infty$-noise). For other perturbations, these defenses offer no
guarantees and, at times, even increase the model's vulnerability. Our aim is
to understand the reasons underlying this robustness trade-off, and to train
models that are simultaneously robust to multiple perturbation types. We prove
that a trade-off in robustness to different types of $\ell_p$-bounded and
spatial perturbations must exist in a natural and simple statistical setting.
We corroborate our formal analysis by demonstrating similar robustness
trade-offs on MNIST and CIFAR10. Building upon new multi-perturbation
adversarial training schemes, and a novel efficient attack for finding
$\ell_1$-bounded adversarial examples, we show that no model trained against
multiple attacks achieves robustness competitive with that of models trained on
each attack individually. In particular, we uncover a pernicious
gradient-masking phenomenon on MNIST, which causes adversarial training with
first-order $\ell_\infty, \ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ adversaries to achieve merely
$50\%$ accuracy. Our results question the viability and computational
scalability of extending adversarial robustness, and adversarial training, to
multiple perturbation types.