Netinfo Security ›› 2021, Vol. 21 ›› Issue (9): 52-58.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1671-1122.2021.09.008

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Image-based Phishing Email Detection Method and Implementation

YI Xiaoyang1,2, ZHANG Jian1,2()   

  1. 1. College of Cyber Science, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China
    2. Tianjin Key Laboratory of Network and Data Security Technology, Tianjin 300350, China
  • Received:2021-04-27 Online:2021-09-10 Published:2021-09-22
  • Contact: ZHANG Jian E-mail:zhang.jian@nankai.edu.cn

Abstract:

Email phishing attack is an APT attack method that exploits lack of consciousness of cyber security and software vulnerability. It can cause serious damage and the number of attacks is gradually increasing. The class imbalance problem of phishing emails and normal emails has been a difficult topic in the field of cyber security. Extracting the characteristics of email body for analysis also has the risk of infringing the user’s personal privacy. The paper proposed an image-based phishing email detection method. It used Simhash algorithm to transform emails into images, and then used LBP method to extract its features. It could not only retain the original information of emails, but also protected the privacy of users. In the paper, DCGAN model was used to expand the phishing email data set. It solved the class imbalance problem in emails and improved the accuracy of Inception V3 model for image classification. Experiments show that this method can detect phishing emails effectively, and the precision of experiments can reach to 92.8%.

Key words: phishing email, image, generative adversarial networks, conventional neural network

CLC Number: