Generative adversarial network-based phishing URL detection with variational autoencoder and transformer

Abstract

Phishing attacks pose a constant threat to online security, necessitating the development of efficient tools for identifying malicious URLs. In this article, we propose a novel approach to detect phishing URLs employing a generative adversarial network (GAN) with a variational autoencoder (VAE) as the generator and a transformer model with self-attention as the discriminator. The VAE generator is trained to produce synthetic URLs. In contrast, the transformer discriminator uses its self-attention mechanism to focus on the different parts of the input URLs to extract crucial features. Our model uses adversarial training to distinguish between legitimate and phishing URLs. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method using a large set of one million URLs that incorporate both authentic and phishing URLs. Experimental results show that our model is effective, with an impressive accuracy of 97.75%, outperforming the baseline models. This study significantly improves online security by offering a novel and highly accurate phishing URL detection method.