Web document analysis and its application to anti-phishing

Abstract

The Web is growing at an astonishing speed and it is now the largest information and knowledge repository. Many web documents are accumulated, which need automatic processing and analysis for intelligent applications. In this thesis, we investigate the web document analysis technique and also develop an application to anti-phishing. For Web document analysis, a visual factor based page segmentation approach is proposed and implemented. Based on the W3C DOM model of HTML, this approach first decomposes the whole web page into many independent salient blocks, which are visually and semantically consistent within each block but distinguishable between adjacent blocks. In the second step, the approach aggregates these salient blocks into semantically meaningful blocks according their positions and visual cues in the web page. In such as bottom-up manner, the approach final builds up a hierarchical segmented blocks tree. We apply our webpage segmentation to the Anti-Phishing problem. Phishing webpages usually exhibit similar visual styles and structure with their target ones. Based on web page segmentation, we propose three metrics (block level similarity, layout similarity, and overall style similarity) to evaluate the visual similarities between a phishing page and its target. If one of them exceeds a specific threshold, a phishing alarm is issued. We have built up a prototype system to demonstrate the business model of our anti-phishing mechanism, and believe our strategy can be utilized as an enterprise solution for anti-phishing.

Date of Award	15 Feb 2006
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Wenyin LIU (Supervisor)