These labels were automatically added by AI and may be inaccurate. For details, see About Literature Database.
Abstract
The rise of QR code based phishing ("Quishing") poses a growing cybersecurity
threat, as attackers increasingly exploit QR codes to bypass traditional
phishing defenses. Existing detection methods predominantly focus on URL
analysis, which requires the extraction of the QR code payload, and may
inadvertently expose users to malicious content. Moreover, QR codes can encode
various types of data beyond URLs, such as Wi-Fi credentials and payment
information, making URL-based detection insufficient for broader security
concerns. To address these gaps, we propose the first framework for quishing
detection that directly analyzes QR code structure and pixel patterns without
extracting the embedded content. We generated a dataset of phishing and benign
QR codes and we used it to train and evaluate multiple machine learning models,
including Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forest, Naive Bayes,
LightGBM, and XGBoost. Our best-performing model (XGBoost) achieves an AUC of
0.9106, demonstrating the feasibility of QR-centric detection. Through feature
importance analysis, we identify key visual indicators of malicious intent and
refine our feature set by removing non-informative pixels, improving
performance to an AUC of 0.9133 with a reduced feature space. Our findings
reveal that the structural features of QR code correlate strongly with phishing
risk. This work establishes a foundation for quishing mitigation and highlights
the potential of direct QR analysis as a critical layer in modern phishing
defenses.