BERTPHIURL: A Teacher-Student Learning Approach Using DistilRoBERTa and RoBERTa for Detecting Phishing Cyber URLs

Phishing is a fraudulent activity wherein an attacker impersonates a trusted individual or organization to acquire sensitive information from an online user. Phishing websites have become a major cyber-security issue in the contemporary digital landscape. As online activities expand in e-commerce, banking, and social media, the hazards presented by these fraudulent websites have intensified. Deep learning-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches offer an effective solution for detecting phishing URLs. However, deploying large models like BERT or RoBERTa for real-time detection poses computational challenges. This study proposes BERTPHIURL, a Teacher-Student Learning framework that leverages RoBERTa as the Teacher model and DistilRoBERTa as the Student model to improve phishing detection efficiency while reducing computational overhead. By applying knowledge distillation, the Student model learns from the Teacher, preserving high detection accuracy with significantly lower resource consumption. The proposed approach effectively captures contextual relevance and local features in malicious URL detection tasks. The experiments were conducted on a dataset exceeding 50,000 URLs to evaluate performance. Results indicate that BERTPHIURL achieves a 94.22% accuracy, outperforming existing phishing detection methods while maintaining efficiency suitable for real-time applications.