Effective Protection Against Phishing and Web Spoofing

Abstract. Phishing and Web spoofing have proliferated and become a major nuisance on the Internet. The attacks are difficult to protect against, mainly because they target non-cryptographic components, such as the user or the user-browser interface. This means that cryptographic security protocols, such as the SSL/TLS protocol, do not provide a complete solution to tackle the attacks and must be complemented by additional protection mechanisms. In this paper, we summarize, discuss, and evaluate the effectiveness of such mechanisms against (large-scale) phishing and Web spoofing attacks. Keywords: SSL/TLS, phishing, Web spoofing, visual spoofing.