Agenda

Speaker:
Fabio De Gaspari, La Sapienza

Abstract:
Machine learning has become the backbone of modern phishing website detection. Early approaches treated the problem as one of visual similarity, comparing full-page screenshots of suspicious sites against known brand pages. The state of the art has since shifted toward logo-based detectors, which instead extract a webpage's logo and match it against a curated brand database. These state-of-the-art detection pipelines are more precise, but introduce new dependencies and, as recent work has shown, new vulnerabilities. This talk gives a short tour of this evolution, from screenshot-based detection, to multi-stage logo-based pipelines that now dominate the state-of-the-art, and the attacks that have been proposed against them. It then presents Logo Extraction Evasion (LEE), a new adversarial attack targeting the foundation of all logo-based detectors: the logo extractor. LEE evades state-of-the-art detectors with success rates of up to 99%, transfers across architectures in black-box settings, and survives rendering in a real browser, all while remaining visually convincing to human users.

Bio sketch:
Fabio De Gaspari is an Assistant Professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Previously, he was a Research Associate at the Sapienza University of Rome, in 2019 and 2020. He obtained his Ph.D. Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Luigi Vincenzo Mancini. He was a visiting researcher at the Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, USA, in 2016, at Cisco Systems, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, in 2017, and at the Oxford Systems Security Lab, Oxford University, UK, in 2020. His research focuses on systems security, machine learning security, and network security. He has published numerous papers in high-profile conferences and journals such as IEEE TIFS, IEEE TDSC, IEEE S&P, ESORICS, IEEE/IFIP DSN, and ACM AsiaCCS. He is an active member of the cybersecurity research community, participating in the organization, program committees, and editorial staff of renowned conferences and journals such as IEEE S&P, NDSS, USENIX, ESORICS, IEEE TIFS, and Computers & Security.