TOP Literature Database PhishLang: A Lightweight, Client-Side Phishing Detection Framework using MobileBERT for Real-Time, Explainable Threat Mitigation
arxiv
PhishLang: A Lightweight, Client-Side Phishing Detection Framework using MobileBERT for Real-Time, Explainable Threat Mitigation
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Abstract
In this paper, we introduce PhishLang, an open-source, lightweight language
model specifically designed for phishing website detection through contextual
analysis of the website. Unlike traditional heuristic or machine learning
models that rely on static features and struggle to adapt to new threats, and
deep learning models that are computationally intensive, our model leverages
MobileBERT, a fast and memory-efficient variant of the BERT architecture, to
learn granular features characteristic of phishing attacks. PhishLang operates
with minimal data preprocessing and offers performance comparable to leading
deep learning anti-phishing tools, while being significantly faster and less
resource-intensive. Over a 3.5-month testing period, PhishLang successfully
identified 25,796 phishing URLs, many of which were undetected by popular
antiphishing blocklists, thus demonstrating its potential to enhance current
detection measures. Capitalizing on PhishLang's resource efficiency, we release
the first open-source fully client-side Chromium browser extension that
provides inference locally without requiring to consult an online blocklist and
can be run on low-end systems with no impact on inference times. Our
implementation not only outperforms prevalent (server-side) phishing tools, but
is significantly more effective than the limited commercial client-side
measures available. Furthermore, we study how PhishLang can be integrated with
GPT-3.5 Turbo to create explainable blocklisting -- which, upon detection of a
website, provides users with detailed contextual information about the features
that led to a website being marked as phishing.