Hook, Line, and Sinker: AI-Powered Phishing Defense of Digital Communications

The rapid evolution of phishing attacks targeting email, chat, and social media platforms poses a significant threat to digital security, with a reported 667% surge in spear-phishing during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis [1]. Current AI-based detection systems face challenges in dataset diversity, adversarial robustness, computational scalability, model interpretability, and privacy preservation, limiting their efficacy in real-time, multi-platform environments. This paper introduces PhishGuard, an innovative framework for real-time phishing detection, designed to overcome these limitations. PhishGuard integrates lightweight transformer models (e.g., distilled BERT), hybrid detection techniques combining natural language processing (NLP), propagation analysis, and user behavior analysis, and explainable AI (XAI) methods like SHAP and LIME for transparent decision-making. Privacy-preserving techniques, including federated learning and local differential privacy, ensure secure processing of sensitive user data. Evaluated on diverse datasets such as PhiKitA, Enron, and a custom social media corpus, PhishGuard achieves up to 97.5% accuracy, 94% F1-score, and inference times below 5 ms, demonstrating scalability for resource-constrained devices. The framework also incorporates zero-knowledge proofs for verifiable inference, addressing trust and integrity concerns. By tackling cross-domain generalization, adversarial robustness, and real-time performance, PhishGuard offers a scalable, user centric solution for secure digital communications, with applications in finance, healthcare, and social media platforms. Future enhancements include multilingual support and image based phishing detection, paving the way for a comprehensive defense against evolving cyber threats.