MobiFish: A Lightweight Anti-Phishing Scheme for Mobile Phones

Abstract—Recent years have witnessed the increasing threat of phishing attacks on mobile platforms. In fact, mobile phishing is more dangerous due to the limitations of mobile phones and mobile user habits. Existing schemes designed for phishing attacks on computers/laptops cannot effectively address phishing attacks on mobile devices. This paper presents MobiFish, a novel automated lightweight anti-phishing scheme for mobile platforms. MobiFish verifies the validity of web pages and applications (Apps) by comparing the actual identity to the identity claimed by the web pages and Apps. MobiFish has been implemented on the Nexus 4 smartphone running the Android 4.2 operating system. We experimentally evaluate the performance of MobiFish with 100 phishing URLs and corresponding legitimate URLs, as well as fake Facebook Apps. The result shows that MobiFish is very effective in detecting phishing attacks on mobile phones. Keywords—Mobile phones; phishing attack; security; Android I