USC: A Multi-Layer URL Safety Checker for Real-Time Phishing Detection
Author
Mayoori B
Abstract
The exponential growth of internet usage has led to a significant rise in cyber threats, particularly phishing attacks and malicious URL distribution. This paper presents the URL Safe Checker (USC), a web-based security application developed using Next.js 14 and TypeScript, backed by Supabase (PostgreSQL) and styled with Tailwind CSS. USC employs a multi-layered threat analysis pipeline integrating heuristic analysis, keyword detection, domain age verification, and third-party threat intelligence (Google Safe Browsing, VirusTotal, PhishTank). Experimental evaluation on a dataset of 500 URLs demonstrated a detection accuracy of approximately 94%. The system supports both single URL scanning and bulk batch processing, maintains persistent scan history, and exposes a RESTful JSON API. All 15 defined test cases passed successfully, confirming functional correctness, security hardening, and usability across major browsers.
Keywords
URL Safety, Phishing Detection, Cybersecurity, Threat Intelligence, Google Safe Browsing, VirusTotal, Heuristic Analysis, Flask, MySQL, Risk Scoring
Full Text:
References
[1] Verma, R., & Shashidhar, N. (2012). Detecting Phishing Emails the Natural Language Way. ESORICS, Springer LNCS 7459, pp. 824–841. [2] Ma, J., Saul, L. K., Savage, S., & Voelker, G. M. (2009). Beyond blacklists: Learning to detect malicious web sites from suspicious URLs. ACM SIGKDD, pp. 1245–1254. [3] Hannousse, A., & Yahiouche, S. (2021). Handling webpages and predicting phishing websites. Data in Brief, 40, 107664. [4] Verizon. (2024). 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Verizon Business. [5] OWASP Foundation. (2023). OWASP Top Ten – Web Application Security Risks. https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/ [6] Next.js Documentation. (2024). Vercel Inc. https://nextjs.org/docs [7] Supabase Documentation. (2024). Supabase Inc. https://supabase.com/docs [8] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., & Masinter, L. (2005). RFC 3986 – Uniform Resource Identifier: Generic Syntax. IETF. [9] Sommerville, I. (2019). Software Engineering (10th ed.). Pearson Education Limited. [10] Auth0 Inc. (2024). JSON Web Token Introduction. https://jwt.io/introduction