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Cite: Abulfaz Hajizada and Sharmin Jahan. 2023. Feature Selections for Phishing URLs Detection Using Combination of Multiple Feature Selection Methods. In 2023 15th International Conference on Machine Learning and Computing (ICMLC 2023), February 17–20, 2023, Zhuhai, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3587716.3587790 ABSTRACT In this internet era, we are very prone to fall under phishing attacks where attackers apply social engineering to persuade and manipulate the user. The core attack target is to steal users’ sensitive information or install malicious software to get control over users’ devices. Attackers use different approaches to persuade the user. However, one of the common approaches is sending a phishing URL to the user that looks legitimate and difficult to distinguish. Machine learning is a prominent approach used for phishing URLs detection. There are already some established machine learning models available for this purpose. However, the model’s performance depends on the appropriate selection of features during model building. In this paper, we combine multiple filter methods for feature selections in a procedural way that allows us to reduce a large number of feature list into a reduced number of the feature list. Then we finally apply the wrapper method to select the features for building our phishing detection model. The result shows that combining multiple feature selection methods improves the model’s detection accuracy. Moreover, since we apply the backward feature selection method as our wrapper method on the data set with a reduced number of features, the computational time for backward feature selection gets faster.
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Visualizing and Interpreting RNN Models in URL-based Phishing Detection
Existing studies have demonstrated that using traditional machine learning techniques, phishing detection simply based on the features of URLs can be very effective. In this paper, we explore the deep learning approach and build four RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) models that only use lexical features of URLs for detecting phishing attacks. We collect 1.5 million URLs as the dataset and show that our RNN models can achieve a higher than 99% detection accuracy without the need of any expert knowledge to manually identify the features. However, it is well known that RNNs and other deep learning techniques are still largely in black boxes. Understanding the internals of deep learning models is important and highly desirable to the improvement and proper application of the models. Therefore, in this work, we further develop several unique visualization techniques to intensively interpret how RNN models work internally in achieving the outstanding phishing detection performance. Especially, we identify and answer six important research questions, showing that our four RNN models (1) are complementary to each other and can be combined into an ensemble model with even better accuracy, (2) can well capture the relevant features that were manually extracted and used in the traditional machine learning approach for phishing detection, and (3) can help identify useful new features to enhance the accuracy of the traditional machine learning approach. Our techniques and experience in this work could be helpful for researchers to effectively apply deep learning techniques in addressing other real-world security or privacy problems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1936968
- PAR ID:
- 10175645
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 13 to 24
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3381991.3395602
