Fighting Phishing

1
Fighting Phishing with Discriminative Keypoint
Features of Webpages
Kuan-Ta Chen, Jau-Yuan Chen, Chun-Rong Huang, and Chu-Song Chen
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
{ktchen, nckuos, song}@iis.sinica.edu.tw, jychen@csie.org
F
Abstract—Phishing is a form of online identity theft associated with both
social engineering and technical subterfuge. As such, it has become a
major threat to information security and personal privacy. According to
Gartner Inc., in 2007, more than $3.2 billion was lost due to phishing
attacks in the US, and 3.6 million people lost money in such attacks. In
this article, we present an effective image-based anti-phishing scheme
based on discriminative keypoint features in webpages. We use an
invariant content descriptor, the Contrast Context Histogram (CCH), to
compute the similarity degree between suspicious pages and authentic
pages. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves high
accuracy and low error rates.
1
(a)
(b)
I NTRODUCTION
Phishing is a form of online identity theft associated with
both social engineering and technical subterfuge. Specifically,
phishers attempt to trick Internet users into revealing sensitive or private information, such as their bank account and
credit card numbers. Unwary users are often lured to browse
counterfeit websites through spoofed emails, and they may
easily be convinced that fake pages with hijacked brand names
are authentic. When users unwittingly browse phishing pages,
phishers can plant crimeware, also known as malware, on the
victims’ computers. Then, through the crimeware, phishers can
steal users’ private information, redirect users to malicious
sites directly, or redirect them to the intended websites by
way of phisher-controlled proxies.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) reported that
the number of phishing webpages has increased by 28% each
month since July 2004, and 5% of users who receive phishing
emails respond to such scams. More than 66, 000 cases of
phishing were reported to, or detected by, APWG in September
2007; and up to 95% of the phishing targets were related to
financial services and Internet retailers. According to a survey
by Gartner, Inc., in 2007, more than $3.2 billion was lost due
to phishing attacks in the United States, and 3.6 million people
lost money in such attacks. Phishing has thus become a serious
threat to information security and the privacy of Internet users.
To deceive users into thinking phishing sites are legitimate,
fake pages are often designed to look almost the same as
the official pages in both layout and content. In addition,
an arbitrary advertisement banner may be inserted to redirect
users to another malicious website if they click on it. Take the
(c)
Fig. 1. Comparison of the official eBay page and phishing
pages: (a) the official page; (b) a phishing page with the
modified logo; (c) a phishing page with an advertisement
banner inserted.
phisher’s favorite target, eBay, for example. Figure 1(a) shows
the login page of the official eBay website, while Fig. 1(b)
is a phishing page with a slight modification to the logo;
specifically, the logo is smaller and the colored bar below
the logo is missing. Figure 1(c) is a phishing page with an
advertisement banner placed at the top of the page. These
examples show how phishers ensnare the public and how
difficult it is for general users to distinguish between legitimate
and phishing pages.
2
C URRENT A NTI - PHISHING T ECHNIQUES
Several anti-phishing techniques have been proposed in recent
years to strive to counter or prevent the increasing number of
phishing attacks. Generally speaking, phishing detection and
prevention techniques can be divided into two categories: 1)
e-mail level approaches, including authentication and content
filtering; and 2) browser integrated tools, which usually use
URL blacklists, or employ webpage content analysis.
2
E-mail filtering techniques used to prevent phishing are
quite popular in anti-spam solutions, as both try to stop email
scams from reaching target users by analyzing the content
of emails. The challenge in designing such techniques lies
in how to construct efficient filter rules and simultaneously
reduce the probability of false alarms. Phishing messages
are usually sent as spoofed emails; therefore, a number of
path-based verification methods have been proposed. Current
mechanisms, such as Sender ID proposed by Microsoft and
DomainKey developed by Yahoo, are designed by looking up
mail sources in DNS tables. However, these solutions have
not been widely applied yet. Currently, the companies only
provide the mechanisms in their own products and services
free of charge.
A browser-integrated tool usually relies on a blacklist, which
contains the URLs of malicious sites, to determine whether
a URL corresponds to a phishing page or not. In Microsoft
Internet Explorer 7, for example, the address bar turns red
when a malicious page is loaded. The effectiveness of a
blacklist is strongly influenced by its coverage, credibility, and
update frequency. At present, the most well-known blacklists
are those maintained by Google and Microsoft, which are used
by the most popular browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft
Internet Explorer, respectively. However, experiments [4], [10]
show that neither database can achieve a correct detection rate
over 90%, and the worst case scenario can be lower than
60%. Some browser-integrated tools, e.g., SpoofGuard [2],
iTrustPage [11], and Liu et al. [8], [12] adopt approaches other
than blacklists. One of these approaches examines the URL
of a suspect page to determine if it is a spoofed address. For
example, http://fake.net/www.amazon.com/sign-in may link to
a phishing page that mimics http://www.amazon.com/sign-in
as the target. Some other approaches focus on analyzing a
webpage’s content, such as the HTML code, text, input fields,
forms, links, and images.
In the past, the content-based approach, which analyzes the
HTML code and text on a webpage, proved effective in detecting phishing pages; however, phishers responded by compiling
phishing pages with non-HTML components, such as images,
Flash objects, and Java applets. For example, a phisher may
design a fake page which is composed entirely of images,
even if the original page only contains text information. In
this case, the suspect page becomes unanalyzable by contentbased anti-phishing tools as its HTML code contains nothing
but HTML <img/> elements. To address this problem, Fu
et al. [3] proposed detecting phishing pages based on the
similarity between the phishing and authentic pages at the
visual appearance level, instead of rather than using text-based
analysis. However, the proposed approach is susceptible to
significant changes in the webpage’s aspect ratio and colors
used.
Fig. 2. The flow of the proposed phishing detection
scheme. We first take a snapshot of a suspect page,
and extract its keypoint feature information. Next, the features are matched with the keypoint feature information
of protected webpages. The suspect page can then be
assessed to determine whether or not it is a phishing
page.
level. Specifically, we treat phishing page detection as an
image matching problem. Figure 2 illustrates the flow of
our proposed detection scheme, which involves two steps: 1)
image-based page matching, and 2) page classification.
In the proposed scheme, we first take a snapshot of a suspect
webpage and treat it as an image in the remainder of the
detection process. We use the Contrast Context Histogram
(CCH) descriptors proposed by Huang et al. [6], [7] to capture
the invariant information around discriminative keypoints on
the suspect page. The descriptors are then matched with those
of the authentic pages of the protected domains, which are
stored in a database compiled by users and authoritative organizations, such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).
The matching of CCH descriptors yields a similarity degree
for a suspect page and an authentic page. Finally, we use the
similarity degree between two pages to determine whether the
suspect page is a counterfeit or not. If the similarity degree
between a phishing page and an authentic page is greater than a
certain threshold, the suspect page is considered as a phishing
page of the authentic page, and considered genuine if it is not
a phishing page of any of the authentic pages in the database.
3.1
3
T HE P ROPOSED S CHEME
As phishers may compose visually similar phishing pages in
many different ways with non-text HTML elements, such as
images and Flash objects, we compute the similarity of the
phishing pages and the authentic pages at their presentation
Contrast Context Histogram (CCH)
Image matching techniques have long been used for a long
time in the computer vision and image processing fields.
To determine whether two images are similar, a common
approach involves extracting a vector of salient features from
each image, and computing the distance between the vectors,
3
(a)
Fig. 3. (Left) Keypoints (marked by green crosses)
detected in the image. Keypoints are the points in an
image that can still be detected easily after changes
(e.g., lighting variations) are applied. (Right) The logpolar coordinate system centered on a keypoint. The
angle coordinate is divided into 8 levels, and the distance
coordinate is divided into 3 levels; we have n = 24 subregions as a result.
which is then taken as the degree of visual difference between
the two images.
The color histogram, which represents the distribution of
the colors used in an image, for example, is one of the
most widely-used features for image matching. However, we
consider it unsuitable for computing the similarity between
webpages. The reason is that webpages usually contain fewer
colors than paintings; thus, it is not uncommon to find that
many webpages have similar color distributions. In other
words, the color histogram is not a useful discriminative
feature for judging the similarity of webpages.
We use the Contrast Context Histogram (CCH) [6], [7]
descriptor because of its effectiveness and computational
efficiency. Originally, the CCH descriptor was designed to
achieve scale- and rotation-invariance in image matching;
that is, two images are considered similar even if one of
them has been undergone various types of scale- or rotationtransformation. However, such transformations are rarely seen
in phishing pages because the pages must be very similar to the
corresponding authentic pages in order to deceive unsuspecting
users. Thus, we adapt the CCH descriptor to a more lightweight design for webpage comparisons. We call our design
the L-CCH descriptor hereafter.
To construct L-CCH descriptors for an image, we only use
the gray-level information, which we obtain by averaging the
red, green, and blue values of each pixel in the image. The
Harris-Laplacian corners are then taken as the keypoints of
the image. Readers not familiar with the Harris-Laplacian
corner may refer to Mikolajczyk and Schmid’s work [9]
for details. Basically, the corner-detection method finds a
number of salient points in an image. A point is considered a
keypoint if it can still be detected after the image undergoes
various changes, such as shifting, lighting variation, color
transformation, or format conversion. Fig. 3 shows an example
of the keypoints detected (marked by the green crosses) in an
(b)
Fig. 4. The L-CCH descriptor with the log-polar coordinate system. (a) The gray-value contrast value between
neighboring pixels and the keypoint (the center). (b) The
L-CCH descriptor with a 2-tuple contrast vector in each
sub-region.
image.
We use the relative brightness of neighboring pixels to
describe a keypoint. By uniformly quantizing the azimuth
angle and the distance coordinates, the neighbor region of
each keypoint is divided into n non-overlapping sub-regions,
where n = 24 in Fig. 4. The advantage of using a log-polar
coordinate system is that this system is more sensitive to the
image points nearby the center than those points farther away.
For each neighboring pixel of a keypoint, we calculate the
contrast value, i.e., the difference between the gray levels of
the pixel and those of the keypoint. As shown in Fig. 4(a),
a sub-region may contain some pixels with positive contrast
values (the pink pixels), and some with negative contrast
values (the blue pixels). We summarize the information in
each sub-region by averaging the positive and negative contrast
values respectively; therefore each sub-region can be described
by a 2-tuple contrast vector, as shown in Fig. 4(b). We then
concatenate the contrast vectors of all sub-regions to form a
2n-dimensional vector and define it as the L-CCH descriptor,
where n is the number of sub-regions. Finally, to make the
L-CCH descriptor invariant to linear lighting changes, we
normalize it to a unit-length vector.
Having obtained the L-CCH descriptor for each keypoint,
we can quantify the similarity between two keypoints based
on the Euclidean distance between their descriptors. A short
Euclidean distance indicates that the keypoints are similar in
terms of neighboring information. Based on this property, we
find the most similar keypoint on a suspect webpage for each
keypoint, K, on the authentic webpage by the following steps:
First, we search for the two keypoints, A and B, on the suspect
page that have the shortest and the second-shortest Euclidean
distances from the keypoint, K, on the authentic page. Second,
we consider K and A as a successful match if the ratio
between the distance from K to A and the distance from K
to B is smaller than a certain threshold (set to 0.6 in our
experiments); otherwise, we consider that the keypoint K has
no corresponding keypoints on the suspect page. An example
of image correspondence found by the L-CCH descriptor is
shown in Fig. 5, where a line connecting two keypoints means
that a match exists between the images.
4
TABLE 1
The Top 5 Phishing Target Sites
Sites
Number of Records
CR
FNR
FPR
eBay
701
96.8%
0.0%
0.1%
PayPal
632
97.7%
0.0%
0.1%
Marshall & Ilsley Bank
138
97.7%
0.0%
0.1%
Charter One Bank
116
98.0%
0.0%
0.1%
Bank of America
51
95.4%
2.0%
2.1%
Total Number of Phishing Target Pages: 300 pages in 74 sites.
CR: Correct Rate; FNR: False Negative Rate; FPR: False Positive Rate
Fig. 5. Sample result of image matching using the L-CCH
descriptor.
Fig. 7. Matching two pages from different sites. In this
case, there are too few matched keypoints required to
perform clustering.
3.2
Page Similarity Degree
To determine whether a suspect webpage is a phishing webpage, we evaluate its similarity to the potential target based
on CCH descriptors. Ideally, the number of successful matches
found by descriptors should indicate the degree of similarity
between the two pages. However, this is not always true in
the cases of webpage comparison. Two webpages may have
a number of keypoint matches not because they look similar,
but simply because they contain the same logo, e.g., the logo
of VeriSign, Inc., a well-known identity protection service
provider. Therefore, to judge the similarity of two webpages,
we need to consider not only the number, but also the spatial
distribution, i.e., the locations, of the matched keypoints.
To take the location of matched keypoints into account, we
use the k-means algorithm [5] to divide them into a number
of coherent groups based on their spatial distributions. The
algorithm ensures that the keypoints in a group are always
in a neighboring region. Figure 6 shows the clustering result
of the official eBay webpage (left-hand side) and a phishing
eBay page (right-hand side), where k = 4 groups are circled
using different colors. Based on the results, we match groups
of keypoints between the two webpages by voting; that is, for
a group of keypoints, A, on the authentic page, a group of
keypoints, B, on the suspect page will be considered as A’s
mapping if most of the keypoints in A match keypoints in B.
We then define a keypoint as geographically matched if its
group is a mapping of its corresponding keypoint’s group. In
cases where two pages are dissimilar, the number of matched
points will be small so that the clustering cannot even be
performed. For example, Fig. 7 shows the matching result of
pages from different sites. Although a few of match, none
of them are considered geographically matched as no clusters
are found. Given the geographical matching information, we
define the similarity degree between two webpages by the
ratio of geographically matched keypoints to all the identified
keypoints on the two pages. As phishing pages are similar to
the authentic pages they try to mimic, we use the similarity
degree between a suspect webpage and the authentic page to
determine whether the suspect is indeed a counterfeit, which
is normally designed to steal users’ sensitive information.
4
P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
According to a survey conducted by Secure Computing [1],
more than half the phishing attacks in 2007 were targeted
famous websites, such as eBay, a popular online auction
service, and PayPal, a popular online billing service. For this
reason, we collected a number of real-life phishing webpages
that targeted the top 5 phishing targets, namely eBay, PayPal,
Marshall and Ilsley Bank, Charter One Bank, and Bank of
America. In addition, we collected 300 webpages of wellknown online bank and auction services, which are often
targeted in phishing attacks in order to observe the distribution
of 1) the similarity degree between a phishing page and its
corresponding authentic page, and 2) the similarity between
two unrelated webpages. We find that the former is normally
a small value around zero, while the latter is normally a large
value around one. Based on our observations, we empirically
set the threshold to 0.6 and determine that a suspect page
is a phishing page if its similarity degree is higher than this
threshold. The evaluation results listed in Table 1 show that
our scheme achieves a high degree of accuracy that ranges
between 95% and 98%; moreover, the error rates, i.e., the false
positive rate and false negative rate, are much lower than 1%
in most cases.
Case Studies
In the following, we explain how our detection scheme
works in real-life cases. Although phishers endeavor to make
phishing pages indistinguishable from the authentic pages to
deceive users, they usually make some modifications to evade
phishing detection techniques. In our first case, which is a
typical example, the phishers add an advertisement banner
to the phishing page to slightly alter the layout. The change
5
Fig. 6. Clustering and matching of eBay’s official page and a phishing page. Different clusters are circled in different
colors.
Fig. 8. Case study: the login page and a phishing page of Bank of America
may not be noticed by unwary users, but it may make antiphishing tools less effective. Figure 8 shows the authentic
Bank of America login page on the left-hand side, and a
phishing page with an advertisement banner inserted on the
right-hand side. Because the change is minor and Internet
users are accustomed to advertisements on webpages, the
inserted banner may go unnoticed by users. Even so, the
banner changes the aspect ratio of the page and adds a great
deal of red to the image, which will reduce the detection
ability of anti-phishing solutions based on color distributions
and page layout. In contrast, the effectiveness of our scheme
is not degraded because it is based on local discriminative
keypoints, which are invariant to changes in image layout
and color distribution, the banner insertion does not affect
the effectiveness of our scheme. It is worth noting that such
banners not only help phishers evade anti-phishing solutions,
but also make money for the phishers every time a banner is
displayed on a user’s computer.
Our second case demonstrates another common phishing
strategy whereby phishers alter the input form by adding or
removing fields. For example, in the Bank of American case
shown in Fig. 8, the phishers added an additional “Enter
Passcode” field to the phishing page. As a result, unwitting
users may provide sensitive information without realizing that
such information is not requested on the authentic page. In
other cases, phishers add fields that ask for more private
data from users, such as credit card numbers and social
security numbers. It is difficult for most users to detect that
these modifications are fake because people do not usually
remember exactly what fields should appear on an input form.
6
Once again, this case demonstrates the efficacy of our scheme.
Even though both the advertisement banner and the additional
field alter the page layout and aspect ratio, our CCH descriptor
still yields a near perfect matching between the keypoints of
the phishing and authentic pages.
The above examples demonstrate how phishers can alter
the design of an authentic webpage to deceive unwary users.
Nevertheless, to ensure that phishing pages are similar to the
authentic pages, most of the main elements of the original page
must to be preserved. Our scheme is capable of detecting the
similarity between fake pages and the original pages regardless
of the types of changes.
5
C ONCLUSION
Phishing has become a major threat to information security and
personal privacy, and many people have been cheated out of
vast sums of money as a consequence. As phishing pages often
look almost identical to their target pages, many anti-phishing
solutions, such as content analysis and HTML code analysis,
rely on this property to detect fake webpages. However,
phishers are now countering these detection techniques by
composing phishing pages with non-analyzable elements, such
as images and Flash objects, even though the pages still look
like the authentic pages. To address this problem, we propose an image-based phishing detection scheme that uses the
Contrast Context Histogram, a descriptor for describing localinvariant discriminative keypoints. The results of evaluations
and case studies show that our scheme can detect phishing
pages with a high degree of accuracy and only a few false
alarms. Moreover, as our scheme is purely based on passive
monitoring of web pages that users browse, it is orthogonal
to other solutions and therefore can be freely integrated with
existing prevention and detection schemes to fight phishing
together.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported in part by Taiwan Information
Security Center (TWISC), National Science Council under
the grants NSC97-2219-E-001-001 and NSC97-2219-E-011006. It was also supported in part by Taiwan E-learning
and Digital Archives Programs (TELDAP) sponsored by the
National Science Council of Taiwan under the grants NSC982631-001-011 and NSC98-2631-001-013.
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