Efficient Client-Side Cross Platform Compatible Solution for Phishing Prevention

Abstract

Phishing is a crime where the victim is contacted by an attacker posing as a trustworthy source and lure them into providing sensitive information. This work makes sure that time delay is averted and the attack can be thwarted with fewer computational resources. To solve the above mentioned problem, a web browser add-on that works as a background script on the client side is implemented. All the background scripts made cross platform compatible to make the development easier and more efficient. The contribution in this paper is the new add-on, Off-the-hook-plus. The main objective of this Off-the-hook-plus is to find if the web page that the user visits is a phish or not. The page redirect logs along with the page details are used to find if the site is a phish or not. And then if the site happens to be a phish, the similar looking site which this web page tries to impersonate is given. To make the repeated accesses faster, a whitelist is maintained, where all the safe sites are logged. The add-on is experimentally evaluated and the results are discussed and is found to be effective.