Phish Block: A Blockchain Framework for Phish Detection in Cloud

The data in the cloud is protected by various mechanisms to ensure security aspects and user’s privacy. But, deceptive attacks like phishing might obtain the user’s data and use it for malicious purposes. In Spite of much technological advancement, phishing acts as the first step in a series of attacks. With technological advancements, availability and access to the phishing kits has improved drastically, thus making it an ideal tool for the hackers to execute the attacks. The phishing cases indicate use of foreign characters to disguise the original Uniform Resource Locator (URL), typosquatting the popular domain names, using reserved characters for re directions and multi-chain phishing. Such phishing URLs can be stored as a part of the document and uploaded in the cloud, providing a nudge to hackers in cloud storage. The cloud servers are becoming the trusted tool for executing these attacks. The prevailing software for blacklisting phishing URLs lacks the security for multi-level phishing and expects security from the client’s end (browser). At the same time, the avalanche effect and immutability of block-chain proves to be a strong source of security. Considering these trends in technology, a block-chain based filtering implementation for preserving the integrity of user data stored in the cloud is proposed. The proposed Phish Block detects the homographic phishing URLs with accuracy of 91% which assures the security in cloud storage.