SMSPROTECT: An automatic smishing detection mobile application

Abstract

Short Messaging Service (SMS) has grown to become the most widely used feature in mobile devices. The technological advancements that birthed other alternative messaging applications have not been able to phase out the use of the SMS. However, hackers have been exploiting this SMS feature to perpetrate smishing acts. Existing research has focused on how spam SMS could be detected and separated from ham messages but have not really done much at preventing the act of smishing. Therefore, this research presents a mobile application that used a rule-based SMS service to detect and prevent smishing attacks. Specifically, the developed SMS service allows the developed SMS mobile application to intercept incoming SMS to a smartphone. The intercepted messages were then forwarded through an Application Programming Interface (API) to the rule-based machine learning model. The model uses the carefully selected rules to analyze the retrieved message and asserts if it is a spam or ham. The result of the analysis is then forwarded to the mobile application through the API. However, the final decision to retain or discard the spam or ham depends on the user after receiving notification from the user.