A NETWORK-LEVEL PREVENTION FRAMEWORK FOR REAL-TIME QR CODE PHISHING ATTACK MITIGATION

Abstract

Quick Response Codes are nowadays utilized in all the payments, business and information sharing task but due to its static nature it becomes vulnerable for the phishing attacks known as quishing. Existing solutions work after post attacks. This paper presents a network-level prevention framework designed to proactively mitigate QR code phishing attacks before execution. The proposed system intercepts QR-triggered requests and validates them through secure DNS filtering; threat intelligence-based domain reputation analysis, TLS certificate verification, and UPI identity validation for payment-based QR codes. A packet-level inspection mechanism analyses Domain Name System (DNS), Transport Layer Security (TLS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) communication stages to identify malicious destinations prior to user interaction. Based on a policy-driven decision engine, suspicious requests are blocked, warned, or allowed in real time. Results acknowledge 96.4% accuracy, 95.8% precision, 97.1% recall, 96.4% F1-Score with 120.6 ms mean latency on 7000 crafted QR samples and proves the effective real-time phishing prevention.