Skip to main content

Alice, What Did You Do Last Time? Fighting Phishing Using Past Activity Tests

  • Conference paper
Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Computer Network Defense

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 30))

Abstract

Phishing attacks are one of the most crucial modern security threats in the current World Wide Web. An adversary may clone a legitimate Web site and lure a user to submit her credentials to the malicious construct. The adversary may then use the stolen credentials to the authentic site. In this paper we present a novel idea to fight phishing using Past Activity Tests (PACTs). In a nutshell, PACTs take advantage of the fact that the user has accessed at least once her account in the past, contrary to the phisher who accesses the user’s account for the first time. Thus, a user can answer a question relative to her past activity, but the attacker can not.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. APWG. Anti-phishing working group. http://www.antiphishing.org

  2. PHP. Hypertext preprocessor. http://www.php.net

  3. PostgreSQL. The world’s most advanced open source database. http://www.postgresql.org

  4. Yahoo people search. http://people.yahoo.com

  5. Google. Search engine. http://www.google.com

  6. Hotmail. Free e-mail service with security by Microsoft. http://www.hotmail.com

  7. Gmail. A new kind of webmail. http://mail.google.com

  8. Flickr. Photo sharing service. http://www.flickr.com

  9. Gnutella. http://www.gnutella.com

  10. B. Ross, C. Jackson, N. Miyake, D. Boneh, J. C. Mitchell (2005). Stronger Password Authentication Using Browser Extensions. In SSYM’05: Proceedings of the 14th Conference on USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 2–2, Berkeley, CA, USA. Usenix Association

    Google Scholar 

  11. R. Dhamija and J. D. Tygar (2005). The Battle Against Phishing: Dynamic Security Skins. In SOUPS ‘05: Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, pp. 77–88, New York, USA, 2005. ACM Press

    Google Scholar 

  12. E. Kirda and C. Kruegel (2005). Protecting Users Against Phishing Attacks with AntiPhish. In COMPSAC ‘05: Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC’05) Vol. 1, pp. 517–524, Washington, DC, USA. IEEE Computer Society.

    Google Scholar 

  13. L. Wenyin, G. Huang, L. Xiaoyue, Z. Min and X. Deng (2005). Detection of Phishing Webpages Based on Visual Similarity. In WWW ‘05: Special Interest Tracks and Posters of the 14th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1060–1061, New York, USA. ACM Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  14. Passfaces. Patented graphical passwords for enterprise. http://www.passfaces.com

  15. A.Y. Fu (2006). Detecting Phishing Web Pages with Visual Similarity Assessment Based on Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD). IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput., 3(4):301–311. Senior Member-Liu Wenyin and Senior Member-Xiaotie Deng.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. W. Liu, X. Deng, G. Huang and A.Y. Fu (2006). An Antiphishing Strategy Based on Visual Similarity Assessment. IEEE Educational Activities Department, 10(2):58–65

    Google Scholar 

  17. Y. Zhang, J. Hong and L. Cranor (2007). CANTINA: A Content-Based Approach to Detecting Phishing Web Sites. In Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikos Nikiforakis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this paper

Cite this paper

Nikiforakis, N., Makridakis, A., Athanasopoulos, E., Markatos, E.P. (2009). Alice, What Did You Do Last Time? Fighting Phishing Using Past Activity Tests. In: Siris, V., Anagnostakis, K., Ioannidis, S., Trimintzios, P. (eds) Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Computer Network Defense. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 30. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85555-4_7

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85555-4_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-85554-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-85555-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics