Preventing phishing attacks using text and image watermarking

Summary Phishing is a form of identity theft used to illegally gather personal and financial information by providing fake web pages designed to mimic the website of a legitimate business. In this paper, we propose a novel anti‐phishing approach based on using imperceptible watermarking and monitoring the HTTP requests. In the server‐side, a URL dependent watermark is generated and embedded in the elements of the web page, which are logo image and HTML/CSS files. In the client side, to authenticate the website and check its safety, the watermark is regenerated and compared with the extracted watermarks from the elements of the webpage. Security analysis of the proposed method demonstrates its robustness against some common attacks. The proposed method performs fully automatically and without user interaction. It can be simply implemented and used for all kinds of websites, either secured or not secured with SSL protocol.