Fighting phishing at the user interface

The problem that this thesis concentrates on is phishing attacks. Phishing attacks use email messages and web sites designed to look as if they come from a known and legitimate organization, in order to deceive users into submitting their personal, financial, or computer account information online at those fake web sites. Phishing is a semantic attack. The fundamental problem of phishing is that when a user submits sensitive information online under an attack, his mental model about this submission is different from the system model that actually performs this submission. Specifically, the system sends the data to a different web site from the one where the user intends to submit the data. The fundamental solution to phishing is to bridge the semantic gap between the user's mental model and the system model. The user interface is where human users interact with the computer system. It is where a user's intention transforms into a system operation. It is where the semantic gap happens under phishing attacks. And therefore, it is where the phishing should be solved. There are two major approaches to bridge the semantic gap at the user interface. One approach is to reflect the system model to the user.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Wu, Min, 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert C. Miller.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/38314
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/38314

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38314