On Designing and Evaluating Phishing Webpage Detection Techniques for the Real World

While a plethora of apparently foolproof detection techniques have been developed to cope with phishing, it remains a continuing problem with an increasing number of attacks and victims. This is due to a gap between the reported experimental detection accuracy of solutions from the academic literature and their actual effectiveness in real-world scenarios. For instance, design choices made while only considering how to maximize the accuracy of phishing detection sometimes has the unintended effect of constraining deployability or limiting usability. We hope to raise awareness about practices causing this gap and present a set of guidelines for the design and evaluation of phishing webpage detection techniques. These guidelines can improve the effectiveness of phishing detection techniques in real-world scenarios and foster technology transfer. They also facilitate unbiased comparison of evaluation results of different detection techniques.