Phishing Detection via Icon Hash and Domain Verification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Phishing websites disguised as legitimate ones pose a challenge due to their similarity in appearance, making them difficult to detect, as they often reuse legitimate website icons to deceive users into divulging personal information.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a phishing detection system that checks if the icon of a website is referenced to a different domain than its own and generates a hash of the icon to compare against a database of known legitimate websites, alerting users and blocking access if it matches a phishing website.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If phishing websites reuse legitimate website icons to disguise themselves, then the visual similarity to legitimate websites increases, but the difficulty of detecting phishing websites increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the website icon as a separate detection target from the overall website content. By isolating the icon element and comparing it against the website's domain and content, the system can identify mismatches that indicate phishing without being overwhelmed by the visual similarity of the complete website
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary verification mechanism that checks the relationship between the website icon, domain, and content. This intermediary layer analyzes whether the icon appropriately represents the website it claims to represent, providing an additional detection dimension beyond direct visual comparison
2Measurement precision
If traditional detection methods compare overall website appearance, then the complexity of detection algorithms increases, but the precision of phishing identification decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the website into distinct components (icon, domain, content) and applies specific detection rules to each segment. This segmentation allows for simpler, more focused analysis of each element rather than attempting to analyze the entire website as a single complex entity
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different detection strategies to different parts of the website based on their specific characteristics. The icon is analyzed for visual匹配 with the domain, while the content is analyzed for consistency with the expected website purpose, allowing for precise detection without requiring a single complex algorithm
Data Source
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AI summary
An apparatus for detecting a phishing website based on website icons is disclosed. A disclosed example apparatus includes a parser to locate a first website icon corresponding to a first website, an icon hasher to generate a first hash of the first website icon, and a hash checker to determine whether the first hash matches a second hash of a second website icon corresponding to a second website in an icon hash database, the hash checker to, in response to the first hash matching the second hash, determine whether a first portion of a first Uniform Resource Locator (URL) corresponding to the first website matches a second portion of a second URL corresponding to the second website, the hash checker to, in response to the first portion not matching the second portion, identify the first website as a phishing website.