Phishing page detection via learning classifiers from page layout feature

Abstract

The web technology has become the cornerstone of a wide range of platforms, such as mobile services and smart Internet-of-things (IoT) systems. In such platforms, users’ data are aggregated to a cloud-based platform, where web applications are used as a key interface to access and configure user data. Securing the web interface requires solutions to deal with threats from both technical vulnerabilities and social factors. Phishing attacks are one of the most commonly exploited vectors in social engineering attacks. The attackers use web pages visually mimicking legitimate web sites, such as banking and government services, to collect users’ sensitive information. Existing phishing defense mechanisms based on URLs or page contents are often evaded by attackers. Recent research has demonstrated that visual layout similarity can be used as a robust basis to detect phishing attacks. In particular, features extracted from CSS layout files can be used to measure page similarity. However, it needs human expertise in specifying how to measure page similarity based on such features. In this paper, we aim to enable automated page-layout-based phishing detection techniques using machine learning techniques. We propose a learning-based aggregation analysis mechanism to decide page layout similarity, which is used to detect phishing pages. We prototype our solution and evaluate four popular machine learning classifiers on their accuracy and the factors affecting their results. © 2019, The Author(s).