Past work exploring adversarial vulnerability have focused on situations
where an adversary can perturb all dimensions of model input. On the other
hand, a range of recent works consider the case where either (i) an adversary
can perturb a limited number of input parameters or (ii) a subset of modalities
in a multimodal problem. In both of these cases, adversarial examples are
effectively constrained to a subspace $V$ in the ambient input space
$\mathcal{X}$. Motivated by this, in this work we investigate how adversarial
vulnerability depends on $\dim(V)$. In particular, we show that the adversarial
success of standard PGD attacks with $\ell^p$ norm constraints behaves like a
monotonically increasing function of $\epsilon (\frac{\dim(V)}{\dim
\mathcal{X}})^{\frac{1}{q}}$ where $\epsilon$ is the perturbation budget and
$\frac{1}{p} + \frac{1}{q} =1$, provided $p > 1$ (the case $p=1$ presents
additional subtleties which we analyze in some detail). This functional form
can be easily derived from a simple toy linear model, and as such our results
land further credence to arguments that adversarial examples are endemic to
locally linear models on high dimensional spaces.