Browser Extension Trust Assessment for Fraudulent Website Detection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Users often unknowingly provide sensitive information to untrustworthy websites, risking hacking, fraud, and financial loss due to the lack of real-time trustworthiness assessment during online interactions.
Innovation Solution
A browser extension application collects data on user interactions with web pages, analyzes the webpage type, and communicates with a server to assess potential fraudulent activity, providing warnings or taking actions such as redirecting the user or deleting shopping cart items based on aggregated data from multiple sources.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If users provide sensitive information to websites without verification, then user convenience and ease of interaction are improved, but security and risk of fraud increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary trustworthiness assessment of websites before users provide sensitive information. The browser extension proactively collects data about the website, analyzes it against known fraudulent patterns, and presents trust indicators to users before any sensitive data entry occurs, allowing users to make informed decisions about whether to proceed with the interaction
Solution Approach 2:
The browser extension acts as an intermediary between users and websites during the information provision process. It monitors the interaction, assesses the website's trustworthiness in real-time, and provides intermediate feedback to users about the safety of the website, enabling users to adjust their behavior based on the assessment without blocking legitimate interactions
2Ease of operation
If users use the same credentials across multiple websites, then ease of operation is improved through reusability, but security risk increases due to potential credential exposure
Solution Approach 1:
The system provides feedback to users about the security implications of using the same credentials across multiple websites. When the browser extension detects that a user is about to enter credentials on a website with low trustworthiness, it alerts the user and explains the potential risks, allowing users to reconsider whether to proceed with using their credentials on that site
3Reliability
If real-time website trustworthiness assessment is implemented, then security is improved, but device complexity and processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the essential data elements needed for trustworthiness assessment from website interactions. The browser extension collects specific data points such as website URL, requested information types, and interaction patterns, then sends only this extracted relevant data to the server for analysis, rather than transmitting all possible website data
Solution Approach 2:
The system leverages crowd-sourced data from other users' browser extensions to build the trustworthiness assessment database. Each user's extension contributes to the collective knowledge base by reporting their experiences with websites, allowing the system to improve its assessment capabilities without requiring each individual device to perform complex analysis from scratch
Data Source
AI summary
A browser extension application is configured to collect data relating to the user's browsing activity and display notifications on a user interface. A user can instruct a web browsing application to navigate to a website. The browser extension application can detect a type of the webpage, and based on the type of the webpage, collect certain information relating to what the webpage is asking the user to provide and what the user is providing to the webpage. The browser extension application can transmit this information to a browser extension server. The browser extension server can determine a likelihood that the website is associated with instances of hacking online accounts. The browser extension server can transmit a signal to the browser extension application of the user's computing device. The browser extension application can take an action, e.g., direct the user to another website or log out of the user's account.