Title: PHAD- A Phishing Avoidance and Detection Tool Using Invisible Digital Watermarking
1 PHAD- A Phishing Avoidance and Detection Tool
Using Invisible Digital Watermarking
By Sonali Batra
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
2What is Phishing Phishing Trends
- A form of social engineering
- Phishers send fake site's url in spam mail
- A huge problem!
- Number of unique phishing sites in Sept 2013
alone 45,115 ( 56.22 contain some form of
target name in url) - Number of unique phishing email reports received
by APWG - 56,767
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
3PHAD A Phishing Avoidance and Detection Tool
- Downloadable extension to Firefox browser.
- Uses invisible digital watermarking.
- Uses uniqueness of domain name of website.
- Uses robust digital watermarking.
- Implemented using Outguess a universal
steganographic tool. - Based on observation that some phishers copy
content of legitimate sites like source code and
images to use in fake site.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
4Working of PHAD
- Companies invisibly watermark their logo images
with the domain names of their websites. - When phisher copies the image, the watermark
travels along with it. - Browser on client side detects watermark and
compares to domain name. - If both match, website is legitimate else website
is phished.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
5Related Work
- Huajun Huang, Yaojun wang, Lili Xie and Liqing
Jiang.An Active Anti-phishing Solution Based on
Semi- fragile Watermark. - Watermark concatenation of domain name and other
parameters into source code of website by equal
tag method. - Can easily be reversed if phisher is aware of
scheme.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
6Disclaimer
- PHAD is intended to serve only as a first defense
and not as a complete filter. - Artistic hackers having plenty of time on their
hands could make a similar looking logo. - If a phisher has access to the client watermark
detection software, a phisher could observe it to
remove watermark. Then re-watermark image. - No known software exists to automate this yet.
- PHAD significantly increases effort required by
phisher.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
7A Few Questions
- What if phisher takes screenshot or photograph of
image? - watermark shall persist across
screenshots and good quality photographs - What if a company has multiple domain names? Eg
google.in and google.us We shall watermark all
the domain names into the image. The client
checks if at least one matches the extracted
watermark. - What if a company has multiple logos? - All
domain names watermarked in all logos.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
8A Few Questions
- What if a website wants to embed logo of another
company in its webpage? eg. CNN runs a story on
Google or Facebook. - Multiple images allowed on page.
- Company having highest ratio of images compared
to domain name.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
9A Few Questions
- What if a website has two or more watermarked
images? - The company having the highest ratio
shall be compared to domain name. - Instead, if both of images were to be compared,
PHAD would fail. This is because attacker could
put original image with watermark of company and
her own image with her own fake site's watermark
(which would match domain name of fake site)
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
10A Few Questions
- How is this better than using Https?
- Users are not aware that url should be preceded
by https instead of http. - No single point of failure.
- Https can be used as added security measure along
with PHAD.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
11Future Work
- Implement scheme for other browsers and other
operating systems instead just firefox and
linux. - Audit top 20 banks and top 100 websites to see if
they would be able to use this approach or not. - Conduct a 'Wizard of Oz' study to demonstrate
that users like and understand the approach.
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014
12Questions???
Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2014