arXiv · 2512.02243
PhishSnap: Image-Based Phishing Detection Using Perceptual Hashing
Abstract
Phishing remains one of the most prevalent online threats, exploiting human trust to harvest sensitive credentials. Existing URL- and HTML-based detection systems struggle against obfuscation and visual deception. This paper presents \textbf{PhishSnap}, a privacy-preserving, on-device phishing detection system leveraging perceptual hashing (pHash). Implemented as a browser extension, PhishSnap captures webpage screenshots, computes visual hashes, and compares them against legitimate templates to identify visually similar phishing attempts. A \textbf{2024 dataset of 10,000 URLs} (70\%/20\%/10\% train/validation/test) was collected from PhishTank and Netcraft. Due to security takedowns, a subset of phishing pages was unavailable, reducing dataset diversity. The system achieved \textbf{0.79 accuracy}, \textbf{0.76 precision}, and \textbf{0.78 recall}, showing that visual similarity remains a viable anti-phishing measure. The entire inference process occurs locally, ensuring user privacy and minimal latency.
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Md Abdul Ahad Minhaz, Zannatul Zahan Meem, Md. Shohrab Hossain. 2025-12-01. PhishSnap: Image-Based Phishing Detection Using Perceptual Hashing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02243
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