Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads

With the development of internet technology, email has become the formal communication method in modern society. Email often contains a large amount of personal privacy information, possible business agreements, and sensitive attachments, which make emails a good target for hackers. One of the most...

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Main Authors: Yong Fang, Yijia Xu, Peng Jia, Cheng Huang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/13/4425
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author Yong Fang
Yijia Xu
Peng Jia
Cheng Huang
author_facet Yong Fang
Yijia Xu
Peng Jia
Cheng Huang
author_sort Yong Fang
collection DOAJ
description With the development of internet technology, email has become the formal communication method in modern society. Email often contains a large amount of personal privacy information, possible business agreements, and sensitive attachments, which make emails a good target for hackers. One of the most common attack method used by hackers is email XSS (Cross-site scripting). Through exploiting XSS vulnerabilities, hackers can steal identities, logging into the victim’s mailbox and stealing content directly. Therefore, this paper proposes an email XSS detection model based on deep learning technology, which can identify whether the XSS payload is carried in the email or not. Firstly, the model could extract the Sender, Receiver, Subject, Content, Attachment field information from the original email. Secondly, the email XSS corpus is formed after data processing. The Word2Vec algorithm is introduced to train the corpus and extract features for each email sample. Finally, the model uses the Bidirectional-RNN algorithm and Attention mechanism to train the email XSS detection model. In the experiment, the AUC (area under curve) value of the Bidirectional-RNN model reached 0.9979. When the Attention mechanism was added, the accuracy upper limit of the Bidirectional-RNN model was raised to 0.9936, and the loss value was reduced to 0.03.
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spelling doaj.art-9ded29475242453f8a0e35a39b7dc0d92023-11-20T05:06:53ZengMDPI AGApplied Sciences2076-34172020-06-011013442510.3390/app10134425Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS PayloadsYong Fang0Yijia Xu1Peng Jia2Cheng Huang3College of Cybersecurity, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, ChinaCollege of Cybersecurity, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, ChinaCollege of Cybersecurity, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, ChinaCollege of Cybersecurity, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, ChinaWith the development of internet technology, email has become the formal communication method in modern society. Email often contains a large amount of personal privacy information, possible business agreements, and sensitive attachments, which make emails a good target for hackers. One of the most common attack method used by hackers is email XSS (Cross-site scripting). Through exploiting XSS vulnerabilities, hackers can steal identities, logging into the victim’s mailbox and stealing content directly. Therefore, this paper proposes an email XSS detection model based on deep learning technology, which can identify whether the XSS payload is carried in the email or not. Firstly, the model could extract the Sender, Receiver, Subject, Content, Attachment field information from the original email. Secondly, the email XSS corpus is formed after data processing. The Word2Vec algorithm is introduced to train the corpus and extract features for each email sample. Finally, the model uses the Bidirectional-RNN algorithm and Attention mechanism to train the email XSS detection model. In the experiment, the AUC (area under curve) value of the Bidirectional-RNN model reached 0.9979. When the Attention mechanism was added, the accuracy upper limit of the Bidirectional-RNN model was raised to 0.9936, and the loss value was reduced to 0.03.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/13/4425WebmailXSSWord2Vecdeep learningAttention mechanism
spellingShingle Yong Fang
Yijia Xu
Peng Jia
Cheng Huang
Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads
Applied Sciences
Webmail
XSS
Word2Vec
deep learning
Attention mechanism
title Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads
title_full Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads
title_fullStr Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads
title_full_unstemmed Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads
title_short Providing Email Privacy by Preventing Webmail from Loading Malicious XSS Payloads
title_sort providing email privacy by preventing webmail from loading malicious xss payloads
topic Webmail
XSS
Word2Vec
deep learning
Attention mechanism
url https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/13/4425
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