Web Phishing Detection Based on Page Spatial Layout Similarity

Web phishing is becoming an increasingly severe security threat in the web domain. Effective and efficient phishing detection is very important for protecting web users from loss of sensitive private information and even personal properties. One of the keys of phishing detection is to efficiently search the legitimate web page library and to find those page that are the most similar to a suspicious phishing page. Most existing phishing detection methods are focused on text and/or image features and have paid very limited attention to spatial layout characteristics of web pages. In this paper, we propose a novel phishing detection method that makes use of the informative spatial layout characteristics of web pages. In particular, we develop two different options to extract the spatial layout features as rectangle blocks from a given web page. Given two web pages, with their respective spatial layout features, we propose a page similarity definition that takes into account their spatial layout characteristics. Furthermore, we build an R-tree to index all the spatial layout features of a legitimate page library. As a result, phishing detection based on the spatial layout feature similarity is facilitated by relevant spatial queries via the R-tree. A series of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposals. The results demonstrate that the proposed novel phishing detection method is effective and efficient.