PhishSafe: leveraging modern JavaScript API's for transparent and robust protection

The term "phishing" describes a class of social engineering attacks on authentication systems, that aim to steal the victim's authentication credential, e.g., the username and password. The severity of phishing is recognized since the mid-1990's and a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to the topic. However, currently deployed or proposed countermeasures are either incomplete, cumbersome for the user, or incompatible with standard browser technology. In this paper, we show how modern JavaScript API's can be utilized to build PhishSafe, a robust authentication scheme, that is immune against phishing attacks, easily deployable using the current browser generation, and requires little change in the end-user's interaction with the application. We evaluate the implementation and find that it is applicable to web applications with low efforts and causes no tangible overhead.