Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial manipulations in the
input domain. The extent of vulnerability has been explored intensively in
cases of $\ell_p$-bounded and $\ell_p$-minimal adversarial perturbations.
However, the vulnerability of DNNs to adversarial perturbations with specific
statistical properties or frequency-domain characteristics has not been
sufficiently explored. In this paper, we study the smoothness of perturbations
and propose SmoothFool, a general and computationally efficient framework for
computing smooth adversarial perturbations. Through extensive experiments, we
validate the efficacy of the proposed method for both the white-box and
black-box attack scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate that: (i) there exist
extremely smooth adversarial perturbations for well-established and widely used
network architectures, (ii) smoothness significantly enhances the robustness of
perturbations against state-of-the-art defense mechanisms, (iii) smoothness
improves the transferability of adversarial perturbations across both data
points and network architectures, and (iv) class categories exhibit a variable
range of susceptibility to smooth perturbations. Our results suggest that
smooth APs can play a significant role in exploring the vulnerability extent of
DNNs to adversarial examples.