An ML-based browser extension to detect malicious websites.
Verisite is a browser extension, that estimates the probability of a website being safe using only the URL of the website as input. It works using a fine-tuned DeBERTa v3 model, which acts like a text classifier to categorize the URLs into benign or malicious. The DeBERTa output along with some engineered features are then fed into a fully connected neural network, to estimate the probability of a website being benign. (A score out of 100 is given, with 100 being benign and 0 being malicious).
Extension showing a safe website score.
Extension showing a malicious website score.
Another malicious website with a lower score.
While a more robust defense against malicious websites typically involves analyzing features such as Domain Age, SSL Certificate Age, and potential vulnerabilities like XSS, this project serves to demonstrate the potential of machine learning when applied solely to the limited information available within a website's URL.