project-faccination

Vaccination against fake websites

Auth0 Hackathon Submission

GitHub Release for Hackathon Submission

There has been further edits to the repo as we are continually working on making it robust. The above release was submitted at Auth0 Hackathon. The latest master branch commit is the final version of our code in development.

This project won!!

project-faccination won the 4th position in the Auth0 Hackathon . You can view our submissions here

Tech Stack

• Auth0
• Digital Ocean
• Azure Services
• Node.js
• React.js

What is project-faccination about?

This project, built at Auth0 hackathon, is an attempt at making a nifty service with a chromium based browser extension, a webapp and some apis at informing the user about the safety of the website a user is viewing. We are using an npm package page-data-parser to find out simple metadata like domain, subdomain etc of a page and then use Bing Entity Search to establish the validity of the domain to its content. The service provides a score to every website, which will be categorized into 3 types for the end user for simplicity sake- Safe, Caution, Fake.

The basic functionality will be extended upon in the webapp, where the user can look up for any website, check if the website is genuine or not, and also see a side by side visual comparision of how the genuine website looks in comparision to the fake website!

How it works?

The browser extension sends the current URL to the backend. We use a npm package to get the metadata of the url, and then use Bing Entity Search to find out the closest literal match of the domain to the domain being browsed by the user, giving us an idea of what the user might be looking for. In the web app, we have used another npm package which takes in the url and throws out pictures of how the website uses, without actually opening the website itself, vs the actual website of which the website is a spoof. This helps in educating the user about what are the visual cues that can be used to detect a fake website from a real one.

Installation

Backend

API for URL Status
API for URL Pictures
The backend is on a Digital Ocean droplet with two end points. It can also be accessed locally by following steps.

• Clone this repository git clone https://github.com/Chinmay-KB/project-faccination.git
• Navigate to cloned folder -> server
• npm install
• node app.js
• API will be available at localhost.

Browser Extension

The extension is not yet available on the Chrome web store, so we have to sideload it.

• Clone this repository git clone https://github.com/Chinmay-KB/project-faccination.git
• Open chrome://extensions on Google Chrome, or edge://extensions on Microsoft Edge(Chromium based)
• Enable Developer Mode
• Click on Load Unpacked Extensions
• Navigate to project-faccination/extension and click OK.

Web App

React Front-end with Auth0
The web app is built in React and hosted on Heroku. It can also be accessed locally by following steps.

• Clone this repository git clone https://github.com/Chinmay-KB/project-faccination.git
• Navigate to cloned folder -> client/auth0-web
• npm install
• npm run start
• App will be available at localhost with port 3000.

Improvements in Plan

• Theme for front-end App
• Use MongoDB to store status of URLs previously fetched to prevent excessive load on server and for analytics
• Integrate Auth0 with backend API. As of now Auth0 is just used in React App. Integrating with backend will help in JWT based authentication for API to prevent abuse