A privacy-preserving approach for detecting smishing attacks using federated deep learning

Abstract

Smishing is a type of social engineering attack that involves sending fraudulent SMS messages to trick recipients into revealing sensitive information. In recent years, it has become a significant threat to mobile communications. In this study, we introduce a novel smishing detection method based on federated learning, which is a decentralized approach ensuring data privacy. We develop a robust detection model within a federated learning framework based on deep learning methods such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM). Our experiments show that the federated learning method using Bi-LSTM achieves an accuracy of 88.78%, highlighting its effectiveness in tackling smishing detection while preserving user privacy. This approach not only offers a promising solution to smishing attacks but also lays the groundwork for future research in mobile security and privacy-preserving machine learning.