SHRT : New Method of URL Shortening including Relative Word of Target URL

Abstract

URL shortening services provide short URLs instead of long target URLs. These services redirect a shortly shortened URL to a target URL. As the usage of shortened URLs is convenient, shortened URLs have become common. However, most of shortened URLs are not relative to their target URLs, so shortened URLs are abused for phishing attack. Phishing is a social engineering technique to steal users’ privacy data or financial account credentials. In this paper we propose SHRT, a new method of URL shortening. SHRT inserts a relative word of a target URL into its shortened URL. SHRT’s shortened URLs have relativeness of the target URL, so SHRT’s shortened URLs are less likely to be used for phishing.