AegisZero

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Inspiration

We were motivated to work on our project following a personal encounter, one of the members of our team was scammed of his personal details via a phishing site. The realization of the extent to which this impacted them caused us to develop a tool that will assist other people in not undergoing the same experience.

What it does

AegisZero is a Chrome extension that assists in securing your personal information on the internet. It identifies attempts of phishing, as well as deceptive ads, ensuring the user an additional protection during the navigation process.

How we built it

We designed AegisZero to be a Chrome extension because it is the most convenient way. It was created in HTM, JavaScript and Python, and machine learning models facilitated phishing detection.

Challenges we ran into

How to build a Chrome extension in a tutorial.

Enhancement of our machine learning model accuracy.

Writing a bespoke web scraper to eBay to detect scams once we could not get an API key in time.

Combining all the different elements into a single functioning extension. Given the fact that various teammates worked on different features on a local basis, when we merged everything, we discovered that there were a lot of discrepancies, which cost us a lot of hours, made us omit certain features, and was our biggest challenge.

Achievements we are proud of.

We take pride in the fact that we managed to create a working Chrome extension in such a short period of time. Another accomplishment we are proud of is that we managed to build a working ML model which is capable of identifying phishing websites although our experience going into the project was limited.

What we learned

In the process, we acquired many new insights, including how to create Chrome extensions, how to interact with FastAPI, and how to use such libraries as scikit-learn. It was also an important experience of how to combine various tools into a single product.

What’s next for AegisZero

In the future, given additional assistance or capitalization, we would consider having the extension permanently free and widen its stability by adding more powerful APIs. We see AegisZero as a safe browsing tool of choice.