Phishing remains a prevalent and evolving threat within the cybersecurity landscape, exploiting human vulnerabilities through deceptive email content. This survey presents a focused review of deep learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) tailored to phishing email detection. It emphasizes recent innovations in neural architectures, including CNNs, RNNs, Transformer-based models, and hybrid or multi-modal systems, highlighting their design principles and comparative performance. We analyze a wide range of public and private phishing-related email datasets.assessing their scope, representativeness, and limitations in supporting generalizable detection models. Furthermore, we examine how these models cope with real-world deployment challenges, including adversarial manipulation, data imbalance, and the integration of multi-modal cues like URLs and headers. This work aims to guide future research by identifying critical gaps in robustness, scalability, and dataset diversity.
Deep Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Systems for Phishing Email Detection: A Short Survey
De Nardin A.;Piciarelli C.;Foresti G. L.
2025-01-01
Abstract
Phishing remains a prevalent and evolving threat within the cybersecurity landscape, exploiting human vulnerabilities through deceptive email content. This survey presents a focused review of deep learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) tailored to phishing email detection. It emphasizes recent innovations in neural architectures, including CNNs, RNNs, Transformer-based models, and hybrid or multi-modal systems, highlighting their design principles and comparative performance. We analyze a wide range of public and private phishing-related email datasets.assessing their scope, representativeness, and limitations in supporting generalizable detection models. Furthermore, we examine how these models cope with real-world deployment challenges, including adversarial manipulation, data imbalance, and the integration of multi-modal cues like URLs and headers. This work aims to guide future research by identifying critical gaps in robustness, scalability, and dataset diversity.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.


