Privacy Hills

Inspiration

When we were first informed of the topic of digital privacy, one of our team members mentioned that he had some background in encryption matrix coding, from a competition called Science Olympiad. We also noticed that many of us had been using our phones for messaging systems while waiting for opening ceremony to start, a trend that is very real in modern day society. With these two ideas in mind, we started on a project that would protect user input messages using encryption coding and decrypting them at their discretion.

What it does

When the user enters a message, the program converts the message, along with a chosen key word into matrices, which are then multiplied to create encrypted text. For decrypting, the encrypted text and key are converted into matrices. The key matrix becomes inverted, which allows the program to decrypt the text through multiplication.

How we built it

We built the website using an HTML frontend. The main encrypting was initially built in Java, then converted to JavaScript to become embedded into the HTML.

Challenges we ran into

Converting characters into numbers was difficult because we initially tried converting to ASCII values but some of the values failed to print, causing errors during decryption. This was solved by using a base 95 system in place of the original base 127. Also none of us knew JavaScript coming into this Hackathon so we were required to learn the syntax in a day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We coded an algorithm that is very complex and uses linear algebra successfully. Also, we were able to successfully use a language that none of us were familiar with.

What we learned

We learned how different object based languages interact and how they can differ or remain the same. Today we also learned how to efficiently debug code, which started nearly dysfunctional and very buggy.