PhishDebate: An LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Phishing Website Detection

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Li, Wenhao, Manickam, Selvakumar, Chong, Yung-wey, Karuppayah, Shankar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914379005427712
author Li, Wenhao
Manickam, Selvakumar
Chong, Yung-wey
Karuppayah, Shankar
author_facet Li, Wenhao
Manickam, Selvakumar
Chong, Yung-wey
Karuppayah, Shankar
contents Phishing websites remain a major cybersecurity threat, exploiting deceptive structures, brand impersonation, and social engineering to evade detection. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved phishing detection through contextual understanding, yet most existing approaches rely on single-agent classification, which is prone to hallucination and often lacks interpretability and robustness. To address these limitations, we propose PhishDebate, a modular multi-agent LLM-based debate framework for phishing website detection. Four specialized agents independently analyze webpage aspects, including URL structure, HTML composition, semantic content, and brand impersonation, under the coordination of a Moderator and final Judge. Through structured debate and divergent reasoning, the framework achieves more accurate and interpretable decisions. By reducing uncertain predictions and providing transparent reasoning, PhishDebate functions as an analyst-augmentation system that lowers cognitive load and supports early, left-of-exploit detection of phishing threats. Evaluations on commercial LLMs show that PhishDebate achieves 98.2 % recall on a real-world phishing dataset and outperforms single-agent and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) baselines. Its modular design enables agent-level configurability, allowing adaptation to varying resource and application requirements, and offers scalability to high-velocity, large-scale security data environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15656
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PhishDebate: An LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Phishing Website Detection
Li, Wenhao
Manickam, Selvakumar
Chong, Yung-wey
Karuppayah, Shankar
Cryptography and Security
Phishing websites remain a major cybersecurity threat, exploiting deceptive structures, brand impersonation, and social engineering to evade detection. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved phishing detection through contextual understanding, yet most existing approaches rely on single-agent classification, which is prone to hallucination and often lacks interpretability and robustness. To address these limitations, we propose PhishDebate, a modular multi-agent LLM-based debate framework for phishing website detection. Four specialized agents independently analyze webpage aspects, including URL structure, HTML composition, semantic content, and brand impersonation, under the coordination of a Moderator and final Judge. Through structured debate and divergent reasoning, the framework achieves more accurate and interpretable decisions. By reducing uncertain predictions and providing transparent reasoning, PhishDebate functions as an analyst-augmentation system that lowers cognitive load and supports early, left-of-exploit detection of phishing threats. Evaluations on commercial LLMs show that PhishDebate achieves 98.2 % recall on a real-world phishing dataset and outperforms single-agent and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) baselines. Its modular design enables agent-level configurability, allowing adaptation to varying resource and application requirements, and offers scalability to high-velocity, large-scale security data environments.
title PhishDebate: An LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Phishing Website Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15656