Appearance Of Web Pages Research Articles

Phishing-Alarm: Robust and Efficient Phishing Detection via Page Component Similarity

Social networks have become one of the most popular platforms for users to interact with each other. Given the huge amount of sensitive data available in social network platforms, user privacy protection on social networks has become one of the most urgent research issues. As a traditional information stealing technique, phishing attacks still work in their way to cause a lot of privacy violation incidents. In a Web-based phishing attack, an attacker sets up scam Web pages (pretending to be an important Website such as a social network portal) to lure users to input their private information, such as passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and so on. In fact, the appearance of Web pages is among the most important factors in deceiving users, and thus, the similarity among Web pages is a critical metric for detecting phishing Websites. In this paper, we present a new solution, called Phishing-Alarm, to detect phishing attacks using features that are hard to evade by attackers. In particular, we present an algorithm to quantify the suspiciousness ratings of Web pages based on the similarity of visual appearance between the Web pages. Since cascading style sheet (CSS) is the technique to specify page layout across browser implementations, our approach uses CSS as the basis to accurately quantify the visual similarity of each page element. As page elements do not have the same influence to pages, we base our rating method on weighted page-component similarity. We prototyped our approach in the Google Chrome browser. Our large-scale evaluation using real-world websites shows the effectiveness of our approach. The proof of concept implementation verifies the correctness and accuracy of our approach with a relatively low performance overhead.

WHAT AFFECTS WEB CREDIBILITY PERCEPTION? AN ANALYSIS OF TEXTUAL JUSTIFICATIONS

In this paper, we present the findings of a qualitative analysis of 15,750 com- ments left by 2,041 participants in a Reconcile web credibility evaluation study. While assessing the credibility of the presented pages, respondents of the Re- concile studies were also asked to justify their ratings in writing. This work attempts to give an insight into the factors that aected the credibility asses- sment. To the best of our knowledge, the presented study is the most-recent large-scale study of its kind carried out since 2003, when the Fogg et al. -How do users evaluate the credibility of Web sites? A study with over 2,500 parti- cipants' paper was published. The performed analysis shows that the findings made a decade ago are still mostly valid today despite the passage of time and the advancement of Internet technologies. However we report a weaker impact of webpage appearance. A much bigger dataset (as compared to Fogg's stu- dies) allowed respondents to reveal additional features, which influenced the credibility evaluations.

Innocuous Communication via HTML Hiding Data in Plain Sight

HTML, an ellipsis for Hypertext Markup Language, is meant exclusively for Web browsers. Apart from contents, it also includes information pertaining to their respective layout and format within its body. Any ASCII Text file can easily be converted into HTML file format by adding TAGs (called elements of HTML) to it and saving it with an ‘.html’ file extension. HTML TAGs are language-specific reserve words enclosed in ‘angle brackets’ that in general come in pair referred to as ‘start’ and ‘end tag’. Most importantly, HTML TAGs are case insensitive and allow for their structuring/re-ordering in a variety of ways. A Web browser is a software application that understands the HTML file format and displays its contents excluding TAGs according to the format specified in TAGs, if any. Web browser is responsible for traversing and retrieving Web resources on the Internet and presenting it before the end user. Hence, HTML documents seem an ideal cover for hiding secret information, as regardless of the manner HTML TAGs are manipulated within language constraints, the appearance of Web page before the human eye remains impervious. This paper introduces its reader to a novel digital steganographic method for hiding information inside the HTML document by changing the ‘case’ of English alphabet within HTML TAGs. The distinct characteristics of our proposed method in contrast to its antecedent include increased data-hiding capacity of the information carrier (HTML cover) and impermeable perceptibility of the altered carrier (HTML stego object), besides inducing randomness (concept supported by information theory) just before bit embedding ensues.

A study of the service quality of general portals

An Internet portal provides not only a linkage to Web sites but also an entry point to information services. To be successful, it needs to attract a large volume of visitors and consistently deliver a high level of service quality. However, we believe that the service quality of Internet portals, differentiated into business and general portals, should be measured by different instruments, as they are used for different purposes. We conducted two studies employing exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to identify an instrument to measure the service quality of general portals. The results indicated that the instrument is a four-factor model that includes adequacy of information, appearance, usability, and privacy and security. However, only the first two factors are significantly associated with customer satisfaction. Also, it was noted that Web page appearance was not significant for business portals but was for general portals.

Userscripts for the life sciences.

BackgroundThe web has seen an explosion of chemistry and biology related resources in the last 15 years: thousands of scientific journals, databases, wikis, blogs and resources are available with a wide variety of types of information. There is a huge need to aggregate and organise this information. However, the sheer number of resources makes it unrealistic to link them all in a centralised manner. Instead, search engines to find information in those resources flourish, and formal languages like Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language are increasingly used to allow linking of resources. A recent development is the use of userscripts to change the appearance of web pages, by on-the-fly modification of the web content. This opens possibilities to aggregate information and computational results from different web resources into the web page of one of those resources.ResultsSeveral userscripts are presented that enrich biology and chemistry related web resources by incorporating or linking to other computational or data sources on the web. The scripts make use of Greasemonkey-like plugins for web browsers and are written in JavaScript. Information from third-party resources are extracted using open Application Programming Interfaces, while common Universal Resource Locator schemes are used to make deep links to related information in that external resource. The userscripts presented here use a variety of techniques and resources, and show the potential of such scripts.ConclusionThis paper discusses a number of userscripts that aggregate information from two or more web resources. Examples are shown that enrich web pages with information from other resources, and show how information from web pages can be used to link to, search, and process information in other resources. Due to the nature of userscripts, scientists are able to select those scripts they find useful on a daily basis, as the scripts run directly in their own web browser rather than on the web server. This flexibility allows the scientists to tune the features of web resources to optimise their productivity.

A Simulation of the Structure of the World-Wide Web

In this paper we are presenting a simple simulation of the Internet World-Wide Web, where one observes the appearance of web pages belonging to different web sites, covering a number of different thematic topics and possessing links to other web pages. The goal of our simulation is to reproduce the form of the observed World-Wide Web and of its growth, using a small number of simple assumptions. In our simulation, existing web pages may generate new ones as follows: First, each web page is equipped with a topic concerning its contents. Second, links between web pages are established according to common topics. Next, new web pages may be randomly generated and subsequently they might be equipped with a topic and be assigned to web sites. By repeated iterations of these rules, our simulation appears to exhibit the observed structure of the World-Wide Web and, in particular, a power law type of growth. In order to visualise the network of web pages, we have followed N. Gilbert's (1997) methodology of scientometric simulation, assuming that web pages can be represented by points in the plane. Furthermore, the simulated graph is found to possess the property of small worlds, as it is the case with a large number of other complex networks.