ViWiD : Visible Watermarking Based Defense Against Phishing

In this paper, we present a watermarking based approach, and its implementation, for mitigating phishing attacks – a form of web based identity theft. ViWiD is an integrity check mechanism based on visible watermarking of logo images. ViWiD performs all of the computation on the company’s web server and it does not require installation of any tool or storage of any data, such as keys or history logs, on the user’s machine. The watermark message is designed to be unique for every user and carries a shared secret between the company and the user in order to thwart the “one size fits all” attacks. The main challenge in visible watermarking of logo images is to maintain the aesthetics of the watermarked logo to avoid damage to its marketing purpose yet be able to insert a robust and readable watermark into it. Logo images have large uniform areas and very few objects in them, which is a challenge for robust visible watermarking. We tested our scheme with two different visible watermarking techniques on various randomly selected logo images.