Profiler

Main Functionality.
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Inspiration

This year we decided to focus on the cyber security track. The motivation behind doing so is the mass surge of people working remotely. Furthermore, due to the nature of remote work there has been an increase in web users. Whether it's to check e-mail, send confidential documents, or use work related software the web is a major platform for doing so. With Profiler we created a simple web app that aims to increase awareness in privacy on the world wide web; additionally, we also wanted to provide "quick & easy" access to tools that help mitigate threats on the web (i.e. phishing emails, malicious sites, isolated). These tools can help people who aren't very technical with safe online practices. In a nutshell we want to bring awareness in regard to privacy on the web and how to be safe online with free tools.

What it does

The main functionality of Profiler aims to bring "web privacy awareness" by creating a web application that can detect the web sites you're logged into, and the extensions you have installed. We aim to make a point that websites can track you across the web. We accomplish these detections using some clever browser side JavaScript. The Profiler looks at your installed extensions and current logged in sessions and assigns you a "name" or phrase. For instance, a person who is logged into gmail, LinkedIn, YouTube, and has extensions Grammarly, Zoom, Loom, and Honey might be classified as a "college student". The classification is beside the point, but we hope it makes users curious on how its occurring and where.

How we built it

The main functionality uses pure browser JavaScript. It consists of making some clever network requests to extensions and web pages. For the other tooling we used a python library to validate emails, and we used python to open a web page and take a screen shot using Selenium and Chrome. The idea behind this is for this python script to sit in a server where it can safely retrieve images of a webpage that the user wishes to not visit locally in their browser. Additonally, we wanted to use Virus Total's free API to assess URLS.