Countering phishing threats with trust-by-wire in packet-switched ip networks - a conceptual framework

During the last years, the Internet has grown into a mass-medium for communication and information exchange. Millions of people are using the Internet for business and in social life. Users can be reached easily and cost-effectively. Unfortunately the Internet´s open structure is the reason for its frequent misuse for illegal and criminal actions such as dissembling phishing attacks. Thus, anti-phishing techniques are needed to recognize potential phishing threats. But mostly these techniques are only of reactive nature, are soon circumvented by expert frauds, or are not efficient enough. This paper describes an anti-phishing framework. A concept for trust management and a mechanism called IPclip are presented. The main idea of IPclip is to guarantee trust-by-wire in packet-switched networks by providing trustworthy location information along with every IP packet. This information is used as supplementary and trustworthy trigger to identify potential phishing threats. Besides, the proposed framework allows for tracing the threat´s origin by using a set of location information.