Battle Against Phishing
Battle Against Phishing
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1. INTRODUCTION
Phishing is a model problem for usability concerns in privacy
and security because both system designers and attackers
battle in the user interface space. Careful analysis of the
phishing problem promises to shed light on a wide range of
security usability problems.
In this paper, we examine the case of users authenticating web
sites in the context of phishing attacks. In a phishing attack,
the attacker spoofs a website (e.g., a financial services
website). The attacker draws a victim to the rogue website,
sometimes by embedding a link in email and encouraging the
user to click on the link. The rogue website usually looks
exactly like a known website, sharing logos and images, but
the rogue website serves only to capture the users personal
information. Many phishing attacks seek to gain credit card
information, account numbers, usernames and passwords that
enable the attacker to perpetrate fraud and identity theft. Data
suggest that some phishing attacks have convinced up to 5%
of their recipients to provide sensitive information to spoofed
websites. About two million users gave information to spoofed
websites resulting in direct losses of $1.2 billion for U.S.
banks and card issuers in 2003. 2780 unique active phishing
attack websites were reported in the month of March 2005
alone.
Data suggest that some phishing attacks have convinced up to
5% of their recipients to provide sensitive information to
2. TYPES OF PHISHING
2.1 Deceptive
Sending a deceptive email, in bulk, with a call to action that
demands the recipient click on a link.
2.2 Malware-Based
Running malicious software on the users machine. Various
forms of malware-based phishing are:
Key Loggers & Screen Loggers
Session Hijackers
Web Trojans
Data Theft
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2.3 DNS-Based
Phishing that interferes with the integrity of the lookup
process for a domain name. Forms of DNS-based phishing
are:
Hosts file poisoning
Polluting users DNS cache
Proxy server compromise
2.4 Content-Injection
Inserting malicious content into legitimate site.
Three primary types of content-injection phishing:
Hackers can compromise a server through a security
vulnerability and replace or augment the legitimate content
with malicious content.
Malicious content can be inserted into a site through a crosssite scripting vulnerability.
Malicious actions can be performed on a site through a SQL
injection vulnerability.
Create web pages for fake products, get the pages indexed by
search engines, and wait for users to enter their confidential
information as part of an order, sign-up, or balance transfer.
Once a secret has been left unprotected, even for a short time,
there is no way to guarantee that it can not been exploited by
an attacker. This property encourages us to design systems
that place a high priority on helping users to protect sensitive
data before it leaves their control.
While each of these properties by themselves seem selfevident, when combined, they suggest a series of tests for
proposed anti-phishing software. We argue that to be fully
effective, anti-phishing solutions must be designed with these
properties in mind.
3. SECURITY PROPERTIES
Paragraph Why is security design for phishing hard?[6] a
variety of researchers have proposed systems designed to
thwart phishing; yet these systems appear to be of limited
success. Here are some properties that come into play:
4. SOLUTIONS
4.1 Design Requirements
With the security properties and task analysis in mind, our
goal is to develop an authentication scheme that does not
impose undue burden on the user, in terms of effort or time. In
particular, we strive to minimize user memory requirements.
Our interface has the following properties:
To authenticate himself, the user has to recognize only one
image and remember one low entropy password, no matter
how many servers he wishes to interact with.
To authenticate content from a server, the user only needs to
perform one visual matching operation to compare two
images.
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It is hard for an attacker to spoof the indicators of a successful
authentication. We use an underlying authentication protocol
to achieve the following security properties:
At the end of an interaction, the server authenticates the user,
and the user authenticates the server.
No personally identifiable information is sent over the
network.
An attacker can not masquerade as the user or the server, even
after observing any number of successful authentications.
4.2 Overview
Solution is that we have to develop an extension for the
Mozilla Firefox browser. We chose the Mozilla platform for
its openness and ease of modification. The standard Mozilla
browser interface and our extension are built using Mozilla's
XML-based User interface Language (XUL), a mark up
language for describing user interface elements. In this
section, we provide an overview of our solution before
describing each component in depth.
First, our extension will provide the user with a trusted
password window. This is a dedicated window for the user to
enter usernames and passwords and for the browser to display
security information. We present a technique to establish a
trusted path between the user and this window that requires
the user to recognize a photographic image.
Next, we present a technique for a user to distinguish
authenticated web pages from insecure or spoofed web
pages. Our technique does not require the user to recognize a
static security indicator or a secret shared with the server.
Instead, the remote server generates an abstract image that is
unique for each user and each transaction. This image is used
to create a skin, which customizes the appearance of the
servers web page. The browser computes the image that it
expects to receive from the server and displays it in the users
trusted window. To authenticate content from the server, the
user can visually verify that the images match. We implement
the secure Remote Password Protocol (SRP), a verifier-based
protocol developed by Tom Wu, to achieve mutual
authentication of the user and the server. We chose to use SRP
because it aligns well with users preference for easyto memorize passwords, and it also does not require passwords to
be sent over the network. We adapted the SRP protocol to
allow the user and the server to independently generate the
skins described above. (We note that all of interface
techniques we propose can be used with other underlying
authentication protocols. We also note that simply changing
the underlying protocol is not enough to prevent spoofing).
create a trusted path between the user and the display, the
display must first prove to the user that it knows this secret.
Our approach is based on window customization. If user
interface elements are customized in a way that is
recognizable to the user but very difficult to predict by others,
attackers can not mimic those aspects that are unknown to
them.
Our extension provides the user with a trusted password
window that is dedicated to password entry and display of
security information. We establish a trusted path to this
window by assigning each user a random photographic image
that will always appear in that window. We refer to this as the
users personal image. The user should easily be able to
recognize the personal image and should only enter his
password when this image is displayed. As shown in Figure 1,
the personal image serves as the background of the window.
The personal image is also transparently overlaid onto the
textboxes. This ensures that user focus is on the image at the
point of text entry and makes it more difficult to spoof the
password entry boxes (e.g., by using a pop-up window over
that area).
As discussed below, the security of this scheme will depend
on the number of image choices that are available. For higher
security, the window is designed so that users can also choose
their own personal images. Figure 1 shows examples of the
trusted window with images chosen by the user.
We chose photographic images as the secret to be recognized
because photographic images are more easily recognized than
abstract images or text and because users preferred to
recognize images over text in our early prototypes. However,
any type of image or text could potentially be used to create a
trusted path, as long as the user can recognize it. For example,
a myriad of user interface elements, such as the background
color, position of textboxes and font, could be randomly
altered at first use to change the appearance of the window.
The user can also be allowed to make further changes,
however security should never rely on users being willing to
customize this window themselves.
The choice of window style will also have an impact on
security. In this example, the trusted window is presented as a
toolbar, which can be docked to any location on the
browser. Having a movable, rather than fixed window has
advantages (because an attacker will not know where to place
a spoofed window), but can also have disadvantages (because
nave users might be fooled by false windows in alternate
locations). We are also experimenting with representing the
trusted window as a fixed toolbar, a modal window and as a
side bar.
Unlike the shared secret schemes discussed in the Related
Work section, this scheme requires the user to share a secret
with himself (or his browser) rather than with the server he
wishes to authenticate. This scheme requires no effort on the
part of the user (or a one-time customization for users who use
their own images), and it only requires that the user remember
one image. This is in contrast to other solutions that require
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users to make customizations for each server that they interact
with and where the memory burden increases linearly with
each additional server.
of a hash of the session key with Carols proof and the random
values generated earlier). At the end of this interaction, Carol
is able to prove to the server that she knows the password
without revealing it. Similarly, the server is able to prove that
it holds the verifier without revealing it.
The protocol is simple to implement and fast. Furthermore, it
does not require significant computational burden, especially
on the client end. A drawback is that this scheme does require
changes to the web server, and any changes required (however
large or small), represent an obstacle to widespread
deployment. However, there is work on integrating SRP with
existing protocols (in particular, there is an IETF standards
effort to integrate SRP with SSL/TLS), which may make
widespread deployment more feasible.
One enhancement is to only require the user to remember a
single password that can be used for any server. Instead of
forcing the user to remember many passwords, the browser
can use a single password to generate a custom verifier for
every remote server. This can be accomplished, for example,
by adding the domain name (or some other information) to the
password before hashing it to create the verifier. This reduces
memory requirements on the user, however it also increases
the value of this password to attackers.
We note that simply designing a browser that can negotiate the
SRP protocol is not enough to stop phishing attacks, because i
t does not address the problem of spoofing. In particular, we
must provide interaction mechanisms to protect password
entry, and to help the user to distinguish content from
authenticated and non-authenticated servers.
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the current site has been authenticated. However, this
approach is also vulnerable to spoofing if the user can not
easily correlate the security indicator with the appropriate
window.
5. SECURITY ANALYSIS
In this section, we discuss the vulnerability of our scheme to
various attacks.
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Volume: 1 Issue: 4
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6. RELATED WORK
In this section, we provide an overview of the anti-phishing
proposals. In general, attempts to solve the phishing problem
can be divided into three approaches: third party certification
and direct authentication, and phishing specific tools.
6.1.2 Trustbar
The Trustbar proposal is a third party certification solution,
where websites logos are certified. However, we must
consider the general purpose graphics and golden arches
properties. Because the logos do not change, they can be
easily copied and the credentials area of the browser can be
spoofed. Therefore, careful consideration must be given to the
design of an indicator for insecure windows so that spoofed
credentials can be easily detected.
6.3.2 SpoofGuard
SpoofGuard is an Internet Explorer browser plug-in that
examines web pages and warns users when a certain page has
a high probability of being a spoof. This calculation is
performed by examining the domain name, images and links
and comparing them to the stored history and by detecting
common characteristics of spoofed websites. If adopted it will
force phishers to work harder to create spoof pages. However,
SpoofGuard needs to stay one step ahead of phishers, who can
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test their webpages against SpoofGuard. New detection tests
will continuously need to be deployed as phishers become
more sophisticated.
SpoofGuard makes use of PwdHash, an Internet Explorer
plug-in that replaces a users password with a one way hash of
the password and the domain name. As a result, the web server
only receives a domain-specific hash of the password instead
of the password itself. This is a simple but useful technique in
addressing the barn door property and preventing phishers
from collecting user passwords. Both SpoofGuard and
PwdHash ignore the general purpose graphics property by
using a security indicator (a traffic light) that can be easily
copied.
6.3.3 Spoofstick
Spoofstick is a toolbar extension for Internet Explorer and
Mozilla Firefox that provides basic information about the
domain name of the website. For example, if the user is
visiting Ebay, the toolbar will display "You're on ebay.com".
If the user is at a spoofed site, the toolbar might instead
display "You're on 10.19.32.4". This toolbar can help users to
detect attacks where the rogue website has a domain name that
syntactically or semantically similar to a legitimate site.
Unfortunately, the current implementation of Spoofstick can
be fooled by clever use of frames when different websites are
opened in multiple frames in the browser window. This
ignores the limited human skills property, because users
must be aware of the use of hidden frames on a webpage.
Spoofstick does address the general purpose graphics
property by allowing users to customize the appearance of the
toolbar.
REFERENCES:
[1] Loftesness, Scott, Responding to "Phishing" Attacks. 2004,
Glenbrook Partners,
http://www.glenbrook.com/opinions/phishing.htm
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22183
[6] Rachna Dhamija, J.D. Tygar, Phish and HIPs: Human
Interactive Proofs to Detect Phishing Attacks. Proceedings of
the 2nd International Workshop on Human Interactive
Proofs (HIP05), Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, 2005.
[7] Nathan Good, Rachna Dhamija, Jens Grossklags, David
Thaw, Steven Aronowitz, Deirdre Mulligan, Joseph Konstan,
Stopping Spyware at the Gate: A User Study of Privacy,
Notice and Spyware. Proceedings of the Symposium on
Usable Privacy and Security, 2005.
[8] Alma Whitten, J.D. Tygar, Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A
Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0. Proceedings of the 8th
Usenix Security Symposium, 1999.
[9] Anti-Phishing Working Group, APWG Phishing Archive,
http://anti-phishing.org/phishing_archive.htm
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