Multimodal and Temporal Graph Fusion Framework for Advanced Phishing Website Detection
S. P. Kavya, D. Sumathi · IEEE Access · 2025
Phishing attacks are among the persistent threats that are dynamically evolving and demand advanced detection mechanisms to counter more sophisticated techniques. Traditional detection approaches are usually based on single-modal features or static analysis, failing to capture the complex, multi-faceted nature of phishing websites and their dynamic behaviors. Thus, we present a robust Multi-Modal and Temporal Graph Fusion Framework integrating advanced learning paradigms that enhance accuracy and adaptability in phishing detection. Our work proposes four brand-new methods: Multi-Modal Hypergraph Fusion Network (MM-HFN), Temporal Graph Neural Network with Attention (TGNN-Att), Federated Graph Contrastive Learning Network (FGCL-Net), and Multi-Modal Temporal Hypergraph Fusion Network (MMTHF-Net). MM-HFN leverages hypergraphs to capture complex, high-order relationships at textual levels (BERT) and graph-based features versus visual ones (CNNs) for an accuracy in the 95–97% range. TGNN-Att addresses temporal variations in phishing behavior by using attention-enhanced temporal graph networks and LSTMs, providing dynamic detection with 94–96% accuracy. FGCL-Net ensures privacy-preserving learning across decentralized datasets through federated contrastive learning, achieving 93–95% accuracy while safeguarding data privacy. Finally, MMTHF-Net fuses multi-modal and temporal features into a dynamic hypergraph framework, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy of 96–98% with an F1-score of 0.97. These approaches together allow for exact, real-time phishing detection by capturing static and temporal behaviors, high-order relationships, and cross-modal features. The framework proposed demonstrates significant improvements compared to the state of the art, eliminating the shortcomings of single-modality and static analysis while offering scalability, privacy, and adaptability levels.