Cost-Effective OCR Implementation to Prevent Phishing on Mobile Platforms

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Presented at CyberScience2020 2020 by

Yang Liu

Yunjia Wang

Tiejun Duncan

Phishing is currently defined as a criminal mechanism employing both social engineering and technicalsubterfuge to gather any useful information such as: user personal data or financial account credentials. Many usersare sensible about this kind of attack from suspicious URL addresses or obvious warning information from browsers,but phishing still accounts for a larger proportion of all of malicious attacks. Moreover, these warning features will beeliminated if the victim is under a DNS hijacking attack. There is much research about the prevention and evaluationof phishing, in both PC platforms and mobile platforms, but there are still technical challenges to reducing the riskfrom phishing, especially in mobile platforms. We presented a novel method to prevent phishing attacks by using anOptical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in a previous paper. This method not only overcomes the limitationof current preventions, but also provides a high detection accuracy rate. However, whether this method can beimplemented ideally in mobile devices needed to be further examined, especially in relation to the challenges of limited resources (power and bandwidth). In this paper, we apply the OCR method in a mobile platform and providea prototype implementation scheme to determine applicability. Experiments are performed to test the technique underDNS hijacking attacks.