Research Article 2026-04-21 posted v1

Multi-Modal Phishing Website Detection with Real-Time Rendering Signals and TLS Fingerprints

E
Emily K. Dawson School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, United Kingdom
S
Sophie L. Cartwright School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, United Kingdom
J
James R. Whitfield School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, United Kingdom

Abstract

Phishing website detection often relies solely on lexical or HTML features, which makes classifiers fragile against obfuscated URLs and template-based page cloning. This study develops a multi-modal detection framework that combines URL lexical embeddings, DOM structural features, page rendering signals (such as font entropy and visual layout similarity), and TLS certificate fingerprints. We build a dataset of 950,000 URLs, including 160,000 confirmed phishing instances collected from browser telemetry and public feeds over nine months. Character-level CNNs encode URLs, while a gradient boosting model integrates DOM and TLS features. A small Siamese CNN compares rendered screenshots with a benign-template bank to capture near-duplicate phishing pages. The framework achieves an AUC of 0.987, recall of 95.4%, and reduces false positives by 19.3% compared with a strong lexical-only baseline. Online experiments in a proxy-based deployment show that median detection latency remains below 20 ms per request. The results indicate that combining transport-layer fingerprints and rendering behavior yields robust, real-time phishing detection suitable for production environments.

Citation Information

@article{emilykdawson2026,
  title={Multi-Modal Phishing Website Detection with Real-Time Rendering Signals and TLS Fingerprints},
  author={Emily K. Dawson and Sophie L. Cartwright and James R. Whitfield},
  journal={Research Square},
  year={2026},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9460394/v1}
}
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