Web Site Verification Service Using Entity Name Query
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Solution Overview
Problem
The increasing prevalence of phishing attacks makes it difficult for users to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent websites, particularly in online banking and e-commerce transactions, as fraudulent sites often mimic legitimate ones, leading to unauthorized access and fraud.
Innovation Solution
A web site verification service that prompts users to enter the name of the trusted entity they believe the site is associated with, using this input to query a database and compare the site's URL against legitimate URLs, providing a warning if the site is not authenticated.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If users rely on visual appearance of web sites to determine legitimacy, then ease of operation is improved, but reliability deteriorates due to phishing attacks
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a verification service as an intermediary between the user and the website. This service automatically queries a database using the website's URL to determine legitimacy, removing the need for users to manually verify visual appearance while providing reliable authentication through the intermediary verification process
Solution Approach 2:
The verification service enables websites to self-verify their legitimacy by automatically querying the database with their URL. The system performs self-service authentication without requiring user intervention, and the results are presented to users to guide their decisions
2Reliability
If a verification service queries a database for each website, then reliability of verification is improved, but productivity deteriorates due to additional time required
Solution Approach 1:
The verification database is pre-populated with legitimate website URLs and their associated trusted entities before verification is needed. This preliminary preparation allows the verification service to quickly match website URLs against the pre-stored database without performing complex real-time analysis, thus maintaining both reliability and speed
Solution Approach 2:
The verification process skips time-consuming manual analysis by users and directly queries the pre-prepared database using the website URL. The system rushes through the verification by performing a simple database lookup and comparison, providing immediate results without delaying the user's web browsing experience
Data Source
AI summary
A user who is browsing the web may use a web site verification service to ascertain whether a web site that appears to be associated with a trusted entity is actually associated with that entity. The web site verification service retains the URL of an unauthenticated web site. The user types a text string naming the entity that the user believes should be associated with the web site into a text box. A database such as an internet search engine database or a database containing a list of trusted entities and their URLs may be queried using the user-supplied text string. The retained URL may be compared to the resulting list of URLs. If the retained URL does not match one of the URLs in the query results, the user may be warned that the web site does not appear to be associated with the trusted entity.