A Robust and Explainable Transformer-Based Framework for Phishing Email Detection
Phishing and related cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with email-based phishing remaining the most persistent attack vector. These attacks exploit human vulnerabilities to deliver malware or gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. Transformer-based models enhance phishing detection through robust contextual language understanding; yet they are often regarded as black boxes due to a lack of interpretability. Moreover, recent AI-enabled attacks further undermine model resilience. To address these challenges, this work proposes a lightweight phishing detection framework based on DistilBERT, a lightweight Transformer model. Robustness to embedding-level perturbations and character-level input noise is enhanced through gradient-based adversarial training using the Fast Gradient Method (FGM), combined with stochastic character-level perturbations. To improve transparency, three prominent Explainable AI (XAI) methods, LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), and IG (Integrated Gradients), are integrated to interpret model decision-making. A structured rule-based prompt combines model predictions and XAI features to guide Flan-T5-Small in generating plain-language, evidence-based explanations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms a standard DistilBERT-based detection model trained without robustness enhancements in terms of accuracy and resilience. This integrated approach helps bridge the gap between model reliability and user trust, advancing transparent phishing detection.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
An Explainable Transformer-based Model for Phishing Email Detection: A Large Language Model Approach
Phishing email is a serious cyber threat that tries to deceive users by sending false emails with the intention of stealing confidential information or causing financial harm. Attackers, often posing as trustworthy entit…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language Modelmodel+2Novel Interpretable and Robust Web-based AI Platform for Phishing Email Detection
Phishing emails continue to pose a significant threat, causing financial losses and security breaches. This study addresses limitations in existing research, such as reliance on proprietary datasets and lack of real-worl…
Dual-Path Phishing Detection: Integrating Transformer-Based NLP with Structural URL Analysis
Phishing emails pose a persistent and increasingly sophisticated threat, undermining email security through deceptive tactics designed to exploit both semantic and structural vulnerabilities. Traditional detection method…
Computational EfficiencyPhishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models
Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email thre…
Adversarial AttackEmail Summarization to Assist Users in Phishing Identification
Cyber-phishing attacks recently became more precise, targeted, and tailored by training data to activate only in the presence of specific information or cues. They are adaptable to a much greater extent than traditional …