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International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology

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EXPLAINABLE DEEP-LEARNING FRAMEWORK FOR REAL-TIME PHISHING WEBSITE DETECTION USING URL, CONTENT AND BEHAVIOURAL FEATURES

AUTHORS:
Sneha Menon
Mincy Sabu
Reshma Nair
Mentor
Affiliation
Department of B.Sc Computer Science,

Saket College of Arts Science and Commerce, Kalyan (E), Thane, Maharashtra
CC BY 4.0 License:
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Phishing websites imitate trusted online services to obtain passwords, financial information, and other sensitive data. Rapid detection is difficult because an attacker can change a URL, alter webpage content after loading, or delay suspicious behaviour until a user interacts with the page. Existing detectors often analyse only one source of evidence or report a classification without explaining which observable features influenced it. This paper proposes an explainable deep-learning framework that combines URL, webpage-content, and bounded behavioural features through a staged decision process. A character-level URL encoder first estimates risk before navigation. Once the page becomes available, a content encoder examines visible text, document structure, forms, and resource relationships. A temporal encoder then examines permitted browser events, including redirects and delayed form insertion, without collecting passwords, keystrokes, or submitted values. An availability-aware gated fusion layer combines the evidence present at each stage and updates the risk estimate when new observations arrive. Integrated Gradients and structured-feature attribution are proposed to generate local explanations; explanation faithfulness and stability are included in the evaluation rather than assumed from visual plausibility. The experimental protocol specifies time-ordered and registered-domain-disjoint data splits, verified phishing and legitimate examples, realistic login-page controls, URL-only and multimodal baselines, and ablation studies. Evaluation measures include precision, recall, F1 score, area under the precision–recall curve, false positives per 1,000 legitimate visits, calibration, missing-modality performance, and time to warning. The framework is intended to test whether combining page evidence with an immediate URL assessment improves detection of previously unseen phishing websites within a practical warning-time budget. Its effectiveness remains an empirical question: performance figures and deployment claims should be reported only after implementation, independent testing, and reproducibility checks. The resulting study would provide a transparent basis for judging both detection quality and operational usefulness.

 

 

 
Keywords
Phishing website detection; explainable artificial intelligence; deep learning; multimodal fusion; URL analysis; behavioural analysis.
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Menon, S., Sabu, M. & Nair, R. (2026). Explainable Deep-Learning Framework for Real-Time Phishing Website Detection Using URL, Content and Behavioural Features. International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology, 02(9). https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsmt.v2i9.017

Menon, Sneha, et al.. "Explainable Deep-Learning Framework for Real-Time Phishing Website Detection Using URL, Content and Behavioural Features." International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology, vol. 02, no. 9, 2026, pp. . doi:https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsmt.v2i9.017.

Menon, Sneha,Mincy Sabu, and Reshma Nair. "Explainable Deep-Learning Framework for Real-Time Phishing Website Detection Using URL, Content and Behavioural Features." International Journal of Science, Strategic Management and Technology 02, no. 9 (2026). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsmt.v2i9.017.

References

  1. Alsakarnah, R., Masoud, M. Z., & Ghababsheh, A. (2026). Hybridizing explainable AI (XAI) for intelligent feature extraction in phishing website detection. Electronics, 15(2), 350. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15020350

  2. Çolhak, F., Ecevit, M. İ., Uçar, B. E., Creutzburg, R., & Dağ, H. (2024). Phishing website detection through multi-model analysis of HTML content [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04820

  3. Gopali, S., Namin, A. S., Abri, F., & Jones, K. S. (2024). The performance of sequential deep learning models in detecting phishing websites using contextual features of URLs [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09802

  4. Kehkashan, T., et al. (2025). Explainable phishing website detection for secure and sustainable cyber infrastructure. Scientific Reports, 15, 41751. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-27984-w

  5. Lee, J., Lim, P., Hooi, B., & Divakaran, D. M. (2024). Multimodal large language models for phishing webpage detection and identification [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05941

  6. Le Pochat, V., Van Goethem, T., Tajalizadehkhoob, S., Korczyński, M., & Joosen, W. (2019). Tranco: A research-oriented top sites ranking hardened against manipulation. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2019.23386

  7. Li, Y., Yang, Z., Chen, X., Yuan, H., & Liu, W. (2019). A stacking model using URL and HTML features for phishing webpage detection. Future Generation Computer Systems, 94, 27–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.11.004

  8. Lundberg, S. M., & Lee, S.-I. (2017). A unified approach to interpreting model predictions. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2017/hash/8a20a8621978632d76c43dfd28b67767-Abstract.html

  9. Mia, M., Derakhshan, D., & Pritom, M. M. A. (2025). Can features for phishing URL detection be trusted across diverse datasets? A case study with explainable AI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09813

  10. (n.d.). Developer information. https://phishtank.net/developer_info.php

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This article has undergone plagiarism screening and double-blind peer review. Editorial policies have been followed. Authors retain copyright under CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The research complies with ethical standards and institutional guidelines.
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