Detection of malicious URLs using Temporal Convolutional Network and Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F29142890%3A_____%2F25%3A00052520" target="_blank" >RIV/29142890:_____/25:00052520 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1568494624013140?getft_integrator=clarivate&pes=vor&utm_source=clarivate" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1568494624013140?getft_integrator=clarivate&pes=vor&utm_source=clarivate</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2024.112540" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.asoc.2024.112540</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Detection of malicious URLs using Temporal Convolutional Network and Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism

Original language description

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL) have achieved remarkable results in various fields and have also been proven to be effective in detecting phishing webpages. Inspired by the great success of NLP and DL models in phishing detection-related tasks, we examined the application of these techniques in classifying malicious and benign URLs (Uniform Resource Locator). We found that the existing NLPbased solutions mainly used Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for phishing URL detection. However, CNN performs poorly when handling non-spatial data, while RNN cannot capture the long-distance dependency and has higher computational complexity. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a phishing detection model based on Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to address the limitations of the conventional CNN and/or RNN algorithms. The proposed model used character-level and word-level embedding methods to obtain the feature representations of the input URLs. Then, TCN was employed for feature extraction and further enhanced with Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanism to classify legitimate and phishing websites. We conducted several experiments to validate the performance of the proposed model and measured various evaluation metrics. The obtained results showed that our solution performed better than other baseline models in classifying malicious URLs, achieving an accuracy of 98.78%. This implied the proposed approach provided an effective and efficient solution for detecting phishing URLs.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

N - Vyzkumna aktivita podporovana z neverejnych zdroju

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

APPLIED SOFT COMPUTING

ISSN

0218-348X

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

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Issue of the periodical within the volume

169

Country of publishing house

SG - SINGAPORE

Number of pages

17

Pages from-to

1-17

UT code for WoS article

001389674000001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

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