On Tackling Social Engineering Web Phishing Attacks Utilizing Software Defined Networks (SDN) Approach

Web phishing attacks are one of the challenging security threats. Phishing depends on humans' behavior but not protocols and devices vulnerabilities. In this work, software defined networking (SDN) will be tailored to tackle phishing attacks. In SDN, network devices forward received packets to a central point 'controller' that makes decision on behalf of them. This approach allows more control and management over network devices and protocol. In this work, we propose a neural network based phishing prevention algorithm (PPA) that is implemented utilizing Ryu, an open source, SDN controller. The PPA algorithm has been tested in a home network that is constructed with HP2920-24G switch. Moreover, a phished version of Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail login pages have been written and hosted on three different free hosting domains. PPA has detected all of the phished versions and allowed the access to real version of these services.