InboxAmour

Inspiration

Everyday, students recieve phishing emails from malicious senders, and every time, someone falls into the trap, losing hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately, this is a common occurence to even the best of us as one of team members lost $2000 to a phishing email. Although most people can easily identify the difference between real and fake emails, some are not as properly educated to distinguish between the two. Our team wanted to target realized that this could be prevented if users can get real-time warnings and educate them on the spot. This aligns with SDG #4 – Quality Education by improving digital literacy and empowering individuals to recognize online threats, and SDG #16 – Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions by promoting safer and more secure online environments, fostering trust in digital systems.

What it does

InboxAmouris an educational email protection tool that finds phishing emails in real-time. By connecting to a user's Gmail account through Google Authentication, the app uses predictive AI to identify possible phishing emails and highlights key aspects of phishing emails for the user. This helps prevent costly mistakes and educates users on recognizing fraudulent email details, ensuring that the user is more knowledge to protect themselves against phishing attacks.

How we built it

The frontend of InboxAmour is developed with React, Node.js, Vite, and Tailwind to create a fast and responsive user interface, while the backend is developed with Flask and Python to process and authenticate Gmails with the Google OAuth API. Our system integrates seamlessly with the Gmail API, allowing for accurate phishing email detection using Cohere. We leveraged Google Cloud to host our Flask API, ensuring efficient performance and scalability.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge that our team ran into was handling session state during Google Authentication. We spent 5 hours debugging states in flask, where between api calls, the session state would reset and lose authentication information, preventing us from properlly connecting to OAuth for user access to Gmail API. Eventually, we solved this problem by storing the session state in a cookie.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our team's ability to overcome the learning curve of integrating advanced technologies like Google OAuth and Cohere to develop a beneficial product. Our group started of as a group of beginner hackers who were strangers to each other, but as we worked together during the time frame, we were able to stregthened our collaboration, learning from each other and creating a product that we believe can empower students to be smarter and safer.

What we learned

In the development of InboxAmour, the team learned how to manage authetication APIs and integrate LLM APIs into web apps. Furthermore, this project helped us improve essential soft skills when facing technical challenges such as ollaboration, problem-solving, and perseverance.

What's next for InboxArmour

-Specialized training to better identify phishing emails -Better authentication storage to safely handle user data -Implementing more features to educate students about emails (e.g writing emails in a professional setting)

Built With

• cohere
• flask
• gmail-api
• google-gmail-oauth
• python
• react
• sql
• typescript
• vite