PhishLang: A Lightweight, Client-Side Phishing Detection Framework using MobileBERT for Real-Time, Explainable Threat Mitigation

In this paper, we introduce PhishLang, an open-source, lightweight language model specifically designed for phishing website detection through contextual analysis of the website. Unlike traditional heuristic or machine learning models that rely on static features and struggle to adapt to new threats, and deep learning models that are computationally intensive, our model leverages MobileBERT, a fast and memory-efficient variant of the BERT architecture, to learn granular features characteristic of phishing attacks. PhishLang operates with minimal data preprocessing and offers performance comparable to leading deep learning anti-phishing tools, while being significantly faster and less resource-intensive. Over a 3.5-month testing period, PhishLang successfully identified 25,796 phishing URLs, many of which were undetected by popular antiphishing blocklists, thus demonstrating its potential to enhance current detection measures. Capitalizing on PhishLang's resource efficiency, we release the first open-source fully client-side Chromium browser extension that provides inference locally without requiring to consult an online blocklist and can be run on low-end systems with no impact on inference times. Our implementation not only outperforms prevalent (server-side) phishing tools, but is significantly more effective than the limited commercial client-side measures available. Furthermore, we study how PhishLang can be integrated with GPT-3.5 Turbo to create explainable blocklisting -- which, upon detection of a website, provides users with detailed contextual information about the features that led to a website being marked as phishing.