A semi-supervised learning approach for detection of phishing webpages

This paper proposes a new phishing webpage detection approach based on a kind of semi-supervised learning method-transductive support vector machine (TSVM). Firstly the features of web image are extracted for complementing the disadvantage of phishing detection only based on document object model (DOM); they include gray histogram, color histogram, and spatial relationship between subgraphs. Then the features of sensitive information are examined by using page analysis based on DOM objects. In contrast to the drawback of support vector machine (SVM) algorithm which simply trains classifier by learning little and poor representative labeled samples, this method introduces the TSVM to train classifier that it takes into account the distribution information implicitly embodied in the large quantity of the unlabeled samples, and have better performance than SVM. The experimental results show that the proposed method not only achieves better classification accuracy, but also has strong applicability as the independent method of phishing detection. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.