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Battle Against Phishing

Phishing is a model problem for illustrating usability concerns of privacy and security because both system designers and attackers battle using user interfaces to guide (or misguide) users. There are two novel interaction techniques to prevent spoofing. First, our browser extension provides a trusted window in the browser dedicated to username and password entry. We use a photographic image to create a trusted path between the user and this window to prevent spoofing of the window and of the text entry fields. Second, our scheme allows the remote server to generate a unique abstract image for each user and each transaction. This image creates a “skin” that automatically customizes the browser window or the user interface elements in the content of a remote web page. Our extension allows the user’s browser to independently compute the image that it expects to receive from the server. To authenticate content from the server, the user can visually verify that the images match. We contrast our work with existing anti-phishing proposals. In contrast to other proposals, our scheme places a very low burden on the user in terms of effort, memory and time. 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 an authenticated server, the user only needs to perform one visual matching operation to compare two images. Furthermore, it places a high burden of effort on an attacker to spoof customized security indicators.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
56 views7 pages

Battle Against Phishing

Phishing is a model problem for illustrating usability concerns of privacy and security because both system designers and attackers battle using user interfaces to guide (or misguide) users. There are two novel interaction techniques to prevent spoofing. First, our browser extension provides a trusted window in the browser dedicated to username and password entry. We use a photographic image to create a trusted path between the user and this window to prevent spoofing of the window and of the text entry fields. Second, our scheme allows the remote server to generate a unique abstract image for each user and each transaction. This image creates a “skin” that automatically customizes the browser window or the user interface elements in the content of a remote web page. Our extension allows the user’s browser to independently compute the image that it expects to receive from the server. To authenticate content from the server, the user can visually verify that the images match. We contrast our work with existing anti-phishing proposals. In contrast to other proposals, our scheme places a very low burden on the user in terms of effort, memory and time. 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 an authenticated server, the user only needs to perform one visual matching operation to compare two images. Furthermore, it places a high burden of effort on an attacker to spoof customized security indicators.

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You are on page 1/ 7

International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication

ISSN 2321 8169


373 379

Volume: 1 Issue: 4

________________________________________________________________________________

BATTLE AGAINST PHISHING


Bharat Gautam1, Mukesh Agrawal2, Anishma Talwar3, Rajan Jha4
1 Graduate Scholar, Computer Science & Engineering, JECRC Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, [email protected]
2 Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, JECRC Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, [email protected]
3 Lecturer, Computer Science & Engineering, JECRC Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, [email protected]
4 Lecturer, Computer Science & Engineering, JECRC Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, [email protected]
Abstract: - Phishing is a model problem for illustrating usability concerns of privacy and security because both system designers and
attackers battle using user interfaces to guide (or misguide) users.
There are two novel interaction techniques to prevent spoofing. First, our browser extension provides a trusted window in the browser
dedicated to username and password entry. We use a photographic image to create a trusted path between the user and this window to
prevent spoofing of the window and of the text entry fields.
Second, our scheme allows the remote server to generate a unique abstract image for each user and each transaction. This image creates a
skin that automatically customizes the browser window or the user interface elements in the content of a remote web page. Our extension
allows the users browser to independently compute the image that it expects to receive from the server. To authenticate content from the
server, the user can visually verify that the images match.
We contrast our work with existing anti-phishing proposals. In contrast to other proposals, our scheme places a very low burden on the user
in terms of effort, memory and time. 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 an authenticated server, the user only needs
to perform one visual matching operation to compare two images. Furthermore, it places a high burden of effort on an attacker to spoof
customized security indicators.
Index Terms: Phishing, Security Properties, Protection
________________________________________________________*****___________________________________________________________

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

spoofed websites [1]. 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 [2]. 2780
unique active phishing attack websites were reported in the
month of March 2005 alone [3].
We examine security properties that make phishing a
challenging design problem. We discuss a user task analysis of
the skills required to detect a phishing attack. We present the
design of a new authentication prototype in Section 4, analyze
its security in Section 5 and discuss user testing. We discuss
related work.

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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International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication

ISSN 2321 8169


373 379

Volume: 1 Issue: 4

________________________________________________________________________________
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.

2.5 Man-in-the-Middle Phishing


Phisher positions himself between the user and the legitimate
site.

that uniform graphic designs can be easily copied. As we will


see in next section, phishers use this property to their
advantage in crafting many types of attacks.

3.3 The golden arches property


Organizations invest a great deal to strengthen their brand
recognition and to evoke trust in those brands by consumers.
Just as the phrase golden arches is evocative of a particular
restaurant chain, so are distinct logos used by banks, financial
organizations, and other entities storing personal data. Because
of the massive investment in advertising designed to
strengthen this connection, we must go to extraordinary
lengths to prevent people from automatically assigning trust
based on logos alone.
We revisit two properties proposed by Whitten and Tygar [8]:

3.4 The unmotivated user property


Security is usually a secondary goal. Most users prefer to
focus on their primary tasks, and therefore designers can not
expect users to be highly motivated to manage their security.
For example, we can not assume that users will take the time
to inspect a website certificate and learn how to interpret it in
order to protect themselves from rogue websites.

2.6 Search Engine Phishing

3.5 The barn door property

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:

3.1 The limited human skills property


Humans are not general purpose computers. They are limited
by their inherent skills and abilities. This point appears
obvious, but it implies a different approach to the design of
security systems. Rather than only approaching a problem
from a traditional cryptography-based security framework
(e.g., what can we secure?), a usable design must take into
account what humans do well and what they do not do well.

3.2 The general purpose graphics property


Operating systems and windowing platforms that permit
general purpose graphics also permit spoofing. The
implications of this property are important: if we are building
a system that is designed to resist spoofing we must assume

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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Volume: 1 Issue: 4

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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).

4.3 Trusted Path to the Password Window


How can a user trust the client display when every user
interface element in that display can be spoofed? We propose
a solution in which the user shares a secret with the display,
one that can not be known or predicted by any third party. To

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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International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication

ISSN 2321 8169


373 379

Volume: 1 Issue: 4

________________________________________________________________________________
users to make customizations for each server that they interact
with and where the memory burden increases linearly with
each additional server.

4.4 Secure Remote Password Protocol


It is well known that users have difficulty in remembering
secure passwords. Users choose passwords that are
meaningful and memorable and that as a result, tend to be
low entropy or predictable. Because human memory is
faulty, many users will often use the same password for
multiple purposes.
In our authentication prototype, our goal is to achieve
authentication of the user and the server, without significantly
altering user password behavior or increasing user memory
burden. We chose to implement a verifier-based protocol.
These protocols differ from conventional shared-secret
authentication protocols in that they do not require two parties
to share a secret password to authenticate each other. Instead,
the user chooses a secret password and then applies a one-way
function to that secret to generate a verifier, which is
exchanged once with the other party. After the first exchange,
the user and the server must only engage in a series of steps
that prove to each other that they hold the verifier, without
needing to reveal it.
In our prototype, we adapt an existing protocol, the Secure
Remote Password protocol (SRP), developed by Tom Wu.
SRP allows a user and server to authenticate each other over
an untrusted network. We chose SRP because it is lightweight,
well analyzed and has many useful properties. Namely, it
allows us to preserve the familiar use of passwords, without
requiring the user to send his password to the server.
Furthermore, it does not require the user (or his browser) to
store or manage any keys. The only secret that must be
available to the browser is the users password (which can be
memorized by the user and can be low entropy). The protocol
resists dictionary attacks on the verifier from both passive and
active attackers
, which allows users to use
weak passwords safely.
Here, we present a simple overview of the protocol to give an
intuition for how it works. To begin, Carol chooses a
password, picks a random salt, and applies a one-way function
to the password to generate a verifier. She sends this verifier
and the salt to the server as a one-time operation. The server
will store the verifier as Carols password. To login to the
server, the only data that she needs to provide is her username,
and the server will look up her salt and verifier. Next, Carols
client sends a random value to the server chosen by her client.
The server in turn sends Carol its own random values. Each
party, using their knowledge of the verifier and the random
values, can reach the same session key, a common value that
is never shared. Carol sends a proof to the server that she
knows the session key (this proof consists of a hash of the
session key and the random values exchanged earlier). In the
last step, the server sends its proof to Carol (this proof consists

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.

4.5 Dynamic Security Skins


Assuming that a successful authentication has taken place,
how can a user distinguish authenticated web pages from those
that are not secure? In this section we explore a number of
possible solutions before presenting our own.

4.5.1 Static Security Indicators


One solution is for the browser to display all secure
windows in a way that is distinct from windows that are not
secure. Most browsers do this today by displaying a closed
lock icon on the status bar or by altering the location bar (e.g.,
Mozilla Firefox uses a yellow background for the address bar)
to indicate SSL protected sites. For example, we could display
the borders of authenticated windows in one color, and
insecure windows in another color. We rejected this idea
because our analysis of phishing attacks suggests that almost
all security indicators commonly used by browsers to indicate
a secure connection will be spoofed. Previous research
suggests that it is almost impossible to design a static indicator
that can not be copied.
In our case, because we have established a trusted window, we
could use that window to display a security indicator (such as
an open or closed lock icon) or a message that indicates that
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International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication

ISSN 2321 8169


373 379

Volume: 1 Issue: 4

________________________________________________________________________________
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.

4.5.2 Customized Security Indicators


Another possibility is for the user to create a custom security
indicator for each authenticated site, or one custom indicator
to be used for all sites. A number of proposals require users to
make per site customizations by creating custom images or
text that can be recognized later. In our case, the user could
personalize his trusted window, for example by choosing a
border style, and the browser could display authenticated
windows using this custom scheme. We rejected this idea
because it requires mandatory effort on the part of the user,
and we believe that only a small number of users are willing to
expend this effort. Instead, we chose to automate this process
as described in the next section.

4.5.3 Automated Custom Security Indicators


We chose to automatically identify authenticated web pages
and their content using randomly generated images. In this
section we describe two approaches.
Browser-Generated Random Images
Ye and Smith proposed that browsers display trusted content
within a synchronized-random-dynamic boundary. In their
scheme, the borders of trusted windows blink at a certain
frequency in concert with a reference window.

5. SECURITY ANALYSIS
In this section, we discuss the vulnerability of our scheme to
various attacks.

5.1 Leak of the Verifier


The users verifier is sent to the bank in a one-time operation.
Thereafter, the user must only supply his password to the
browser and his username to the server to login.
The server stores the verifier, which is based on the users
password but which is not password-equivalent (it can not be
used as a password). Servers are still required to guard the
verifier to prevent a dictionary attack. However, unlike
passwords, if this verifier is stolen (by breaking into the server
database or by intercepting it the one time it is sent to the
bank), the attacker does not have sufficient information to
impersonate the user, which makes the verifier a less valuable
target to phishers.
If a verifier is captured it can, however, be used by an attacker
to impersonate the bank to one particular user. Therefore, if
the verifier is sent online, the process must be carefully
designed so that the user can not be tricked into providing it to
a rogue site.

5.2 Leak of the Images


Our scheme requires two types of images, the personal image
(a photographic image assigned or chosen by the user) and the
generated image used to create the security skin. The users
personal image is never sent over the network and only
displayed to the user. Therefore, the attacker must be
physically present (or must compromise the browser) to
observe or capture the personal image.
If the generated image is observed or captured, it can not be
replayed in subsequent transactions. Furthermore, it would
take an exhaustive dictionary attack to determine the value
that was used to generate the image, which itself could not be
used to not reveal anything about the password.

5.3 Man-in-the-Middle Attacks


SRP prevents a classic man-in-the middle attack, however a
visual man-in-the-middle attack is still possible if an
attacker can carefully overlay rogue windows on top of the
trusted window or authenticated browser windows. As
discussed in Section 4, we have specifically designed our
windows to make this type of attack very difficult to execute.

5.4 Spoofing the Trusted Window


Because the user enters his password in the trusted password
window, it is crucial that the user be able to recognize his own
customized window and to detect spoofs. If the number of
options for personalization is limited, phishers can try to
mimic any of the available choices, and a subset of the
population will recognize the spoofed setting as their own
(especially if there is a default option that is selected by many
users). If an attacker has some knowledge of the user, and if
the selection of images is limited, the choice of image may be
predictable. In addition to a large number of randomly
assigned personal images, we will encourage unique
personalization (e.g., allow the users to use their own photos).
User testing is needed to determine if users can be trained to
only enter their passwords when their own personal image
shown.

5.5 Spoofing the Visual Hashes


If this system were widely adopted, we expect that phishers
will place false visual hashes on their webpages or web forms
to make them appear secure. Users who do not check their
trusted window, or users who fail to recognize that their
personal image is absent in a spoofed trusted window, could
be tricked by such an attack. It is our hope that by simplifying
the process of website verification, that more users (especially
unsophisticated users) will be able to perform this important
step.

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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 Third Party Certification


6.1.1 Hierarchical and Distributed Trust Models
Third party certification includes hierarchical trust models,
like Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which has long been
proposed as a solution for users to authenticate servers and
vice-versa. In PKI, chains of Certificate Authorities (CAs)
vouch for identity by binding a public key to a entity in a
digital certificate. The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and
Transport Layer Security (TLS), its successor, both rely on
PKI.
In the typical use of SSL today only the server is
authenticated. SSL also supports mutual authentication, and in
theory it is possible for both servers and users to obtain
certificates that are signed by a trusted CA. By displaying
seals as graphics that can be easily copied, trusted seal
programs ignore the general purpose graphics property.

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.

6.2 Direct Authentication


Direct authentication approaches include user authentication
and server authentication schemes.

6.2.1 Multi-Factor User Authentication


These schemes use a combination of factors to authenticate the
user. The factors can be something you know (e.g., a password
or PIN), something you have (e.g., a token or key) or
something you are (e.g., biometrics).

6.2.1.1 AOL Passcode


America Onlines Passcode has been proposed as a phishing
defense. This program distributes RSA SecurID devices to
AOL members. The device generates and displays a unique
six-digit numeric code every 60 seconds, which can be used as
a secondary password during login to the AOL website.

6.2.1.2 Secondary SMS Passwords


Other two factor user-authentication schemes, such as issuing
secondary passwords to users via Short Message Service
(SMS) text messages on their cell phones are also vulnerable
to MITM attacks. In general, two factor user authentication
schemes serve to protect the server from fraud, rather than
protecting the user from phishing attacks if they do not
provide a mechanism for the user to authenticate the server.
This ignores the limited human skills property.

6.2.2 Server Authentication Using Shared Secrets


Passmark and Verified by Visa Shared-secret schemes have
been proposed as one simple approach to help users identify
known servers. For example in proposals such as Passmark
and Verified by Visa, the user provides the server with a
shared secret, such as and image and/or passphrase, in addition
to his regular password. The server presents the user with this
shared secret, and the user is asked to recognize it before
providing the server with his password.

6.3 Anti-Phishing Tools


6.3.1 eBay Toolbar
The eBay Toolbar is a browser plug-in that eBay offers to its
customers to help keep track of auction sites. The toolbar has a
feature, called AccountGuard, which monitors web pages that
users visit and provides a warning in the form of a colored tab
on the toolbar. The tab is usually grey, but turns green if the
user is on an eBay or PayPal site or red if the user is on a site
that is known to be a spoof by eBay. The toolbar also allows
users to submit suspected spoof sites to eBay. One drawback
to this approach is that it only applies to eBay and PayPal
websites. Users are unlikely to want to use several types of
toolbars (though it may be possible to develop a toolbar that
would work for a range of sites). The main weakness is that
there will always be a period of time between the time a spoof
is detected and when the toolbar can begin detecting spoofs
for users. If spoofs are not carefully confirmed, denial of
service attacks are possible. This implies that some percentage
of users will be vulnerable to spoofing. For these users, the
barn door property implies that their personal data will not be
protected.

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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ISSN 2321 8169


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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

[2] Litan, Avivah, Phishing Attack Victims Likely Targets for


Identity Theft, in Gartner First Take FT-22-8873. 2004,
Gartner Research
[3] Anti-Phishing Working Group, Phishing Activity Trends
Report
March
2005,
http://antiphishing.org/
APWG_Phishing_Activity_Report_March_2005.pdf
[4] Ed Felten, D. Balfanz, D. Dean, D. Wallach, Web
Spoofing: An Internet Con Game. Proceedings of the 20th
Information Security Conference, 1996.
[5] Bugzilla, Bugzilla Bug 22183 - UI spoofing can cause user
to mistake content for chrome (bug reported 12/20/1999,
publicly reported 7/21/2004),

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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