Countering Phishing Threats using Visual Cryptography

Phishing is an attempt by an individual or a group to get personal confidential information such as passwords, credit card information from unsuspecting victims for identity theft, financial gain and other fraudulent activities. Fake websites which appear very similar to the original ones are being hosted to achieve this. In this paper we have proposed a new approach named as "Countering Phishing Threats using visual cryptography" to solve the problem of phishing. Phishers can attack the most confidential information of the user from the authorized websites. Here an image based authentication using Visual Cryptography is implemented. In Visual Cryptography (VC) an image is decomposed into shares and in order to reveal the original image appropriate number of shares should be combined. The use of visual cryptography is explored to preserve the privacy of an image captcha by decomposing the original image captcha into two shares that are stored in separate database servers such that the original image captcha can be revealed only when both are simultaneously available; the individual sheet images do not reveal the identity of the original image captcha. Due to frequent change in image captcha the authenticated information like password cannot be stolen by the phisher. Once the original image captcha is revealed to the user can be used as the password. Using this cryptography methodology, we can verify its identity and proves that it is a genuine website before the end user.