Pixastic: Steganography based Anti-Phihsing Browser Plug-in

Abstract

In spite of existence of many standard security mechanisms for ensuring secure e-Commerce business, users still fall prey for online attacks. One such simple but powerful attack is 'Phishing'. Phishing is the most alarming threat in the e-Commerce world and effective anti-phishing technique is the need of the hour. This paper focuses on a novel anti-phishing browser plug-in which uses information hiding technique - Steganography. A Robust Message based Image Steganography (RMIS) algorithm has been proposed. The same has been incorporated in the form of a browser plug-in (safari) called Pixastic. Pixastic is tested in an online banking scenario and it is compared with other well-known anti-phishing plug-in methods in practice. Various parameters such as robustness, usability and its behavior on various attacks have been analysed. From experimental results, it is evident that our method Pixastic performs well compared to other anti-phishing plug-ins.