Juli Links
High resolution PowerPoint: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B79ZXZ5mzLmqa0lDb2NGZ242dmM/view?usp=sharing Video walkthrough: https://vimeo.com/211172299
Inspiration
Cyber security is increasingly becoming more important in the modern day as our online lives transition to become almost as important as our offline lives. Almost 10 billion devices are connected to the internet today, every one of them holding important information like credit card numbers, passwords, private photos, and videos. And of course, trailing right behind are criminals in search of that private information. Our team member, Varand, learned about this problem the hard way when a website he had signed up for had their database hacked and all account information was posted online for everyone to see. Varand frantically searched to see if his account was part of the accounts that were exposed and surely enough it was. Right in front of him was his username and password in public eyes. Thankfully he had used different passwords for his various accounts, which lessened the impact, however with some research he found that 55% of all internet users only use one password for every account they have. This attack would have done far more damage for those users. This is when he started thinking of different ways that I could help prevent this from happening to other people, and he came up with the idea for Juli.
What it does
Juli is the most secure and effortless way to protect your accounts online. The fact is that complex passwords are necessary for secure accounts. Going even further, different complex passwords for different websites are necessary for true protection in case one website gets breached. However, because of the hassles involved with remembering multiple complex passwords, very little people bother to take the cautionary step. And unfortunately, the people that do bother to have complex passwords usually have to resort to writing them down or using password managers to remember them. The problem with this is now all of your passwords are stored in one place which is a hackers paradise. With Juli, we figured out a way to provide high-level encryption with low effort from the user; the best part, we don't need to store any passwords with our model.
*Just 22 hours ago a Reddit user posted about successfully hacking into a LastPass account, further proving that password managers are not safe
How to use it
Once you've downloaded Juli, you'll notice our female mascot appears next to all password fields. When you go to sign up for an account, you can type any simple password (such as "monkey1"). Once you've typed the password, click on the Juli icon for the magic to happen. Juli takes the text you inputted in the password field and uses our algorithm to output a hashed password (such as "5@eE6)5@eD8&1!e"). Juli never stores either password, it simply just converts your password to a more complex password using our secret formula. Now that you have your hack-proof password set, whenever you visit the website again and need to log in, just type your simply password ("monkey1") and click the Juli icon to convert it and log you in. Also, feel free to use the same simple password across all of your websites, Juli will create completely different codes so if one account gets compromised the others won't be effected.
*Example of Juli icon showing up next to a password field
How we built it
We utilized the collective skills of all the team members on the Juli project in the most effective way. Each of the three members had very distinct roles in the creation of the project. In order to make an application that a user can use to make their passwords more secure in the most seamless and convenient fashion we knew we would have to make a browser extension. Varand Abrahamian took the role of creating the Chrome extension with zero knowledge of how to make a browser extension or even the coding language required to create a Chrome extension; Javascript. Throughout the three days, Varand was able to learn enough Javascript to be able to create the Chrome extension. We also decided to create a website that would do the same thing as the plugin, in case people could not access the plugin or were away from home. The website http://getjuli.com was created by the other two members of the team Hilart Abrahamian and Daniel Akhunov. Hilart being the head of design for the project and Daniel being the back-end developer in charge of creating our hash algorithm and adding the functionality to the website, using technologies such as Python and Django.
The website http://getjuli.com is the foundation of the extension since the Chrome extension utilizes the API of the website to be able to hash and return custom Juli passwords. Daniel spent the few weeks leading up to LA Hacks to get himself comfortable with Python and Django believing that these technologies will be a key in producing the product and boy was he right. With Django as the backend, Daniel was able to create our custom algorithm that takes a simple password and the url of the website the user is signing into/signing up to and convert it into a secure and unique hash. Daniel used SHA1 as the base of the encryption, adding special characters and capital letters for added security along with a few other twists for extra security.
Hilart became the face of Juli designing every aspect of the product from the graphics to the HTML and CSS of the website and Chrome extension. Utilizing his years of experience as a web developer and graphic designer creating ever so elegant designs, it’s what set up apart from all the other competitors.
Challenges we ran into
We did not have the full coding knowledge we needed upon arriving to LA Hacks. We spent much of the time here learning new things to apply to the product. Multiple times we hit roadblocks, especially when uploading our code to a server and linking it to getjuli.com. Things that we thought would be simple ended up causing us a lot of time wasted, but ultimately they worked out in the end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As our first hackathon ever, at one of the best colleges ever, in the best city ever, our most proud accomplishment collectively is being accepted to LA Hacks and having the opportunity to participate in this wonderful event. We're also extremely proud of being able to surpass the areas that we lacked in, to pull together a fully functional product in the end. This was a first for us working as a team and things moved forward with few setbacks.
What we learned
We learned a lot of hacking and encryption as we built the project. One of our teammates, Varand, was well versed in the field, but the other two were not. One thing is for sure, we're all going to take our passwords and account security very seriously from here on out.
What's next for Juli
Juli needs to get in front of the mass market. Consumers need to know there is a simple, painless way to truly protect their online accounts. It's a no brainer to download Juli and forget about it running in the background.
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