19 October 2006, 13:25

Better phishing protection for Opera

For the forthcoming version 9.1 of the browser, Opera developers are planning to add in phishing protection, comparable to the anti-phishing functions in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Each time a website is surfed for the first time Opera will submit the site to a checking service, hosted on the Opera servers, which accesses databases supplied by GeoTrust. The browser submits the domain and the hash value of the complete URL.

The checking server responds with an assessment of the URL (ok, dubious or fraudulent), without storing the IP address of the user on whose behalf the query is submitted. The browser caches the results and a time stamp determines when the cached information gets refreshed. Depending on the results of the check, Opera displays an "i" (ok) or a "?" on the right of the address bar (where currently information on secure connections is shown) or blocks the site with a warning notice. The query to the checking server should not affect the connection speed, as it will run asymmetrically in the background.

(ehe)

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