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Abstract
In spite of existence of many standard security mechanisms for ensuring secure e- Commerce business, users still fall prey for online attacks. One such simple but powerful attack is 'Phishing'. Phishing is the most alarming threat in the e-Commerce world and effective anti-phishing technique is the need of the hour. This paper focuses on a novel anti-phishing browser plug-in which uses information hiding technique - Steganography. A Robust Message based Image Steganography (RMIS) algorithm has been proposed. The same has been incorporated in the form of a browser plug-in (safari) called Pixastic. Pixastic is tested in an online banking scenario and it is compared with other well-known anti-phishing plug-in methods in practice. Various parameters such as robustness, usability and its behavior on various attacks have been analysed. From experimental results, it is evident that our method Pixastic performs well compared to other anti-phishing plug-ins.
Keywords: Phishing, Plug-in, Information Hiding, Steganography, Security, Usability
© P.Thiyagarajan, G.Aghila, V.Prasanna Venkatesan, 2012
INTRODUCTION
Internet has changed the life of human significantly and it has dominated many fields including e-Commerce, e-Healthcare etc. Internet increases the comfort of human life, on the other hand it also increases the need for security measures too. For example all web browsers and servers take almost every care to make guarantee the safe business through internet. Still they are vulnerable to attacks such as phishing. In this attack, the attacker tries to mimic as legitimate site and gather critical information from the user which in turn will be used to make control of the user's valuable and critical information.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an association of internet service providers is collecting information on Phishing incidents from financial institutions, online-retailers, and other IT-companies. The collected data is published in the monthly Phishing Activity Trends Report, which clearly shows the dramatically increase in Phishing attacks. Figure 1 shows the number of phishing site detected in various countries in the year 2010 by APWG. From surveys, it is observed that millions of customers are at risk of affected by Phishing in recent year. APWG further states that financial and payment services are the major sector which falls prey for phishing.
In this paper a novel Robust Message based Image Steganography (RMIS) algorithm has been proposed...