Cerberus

Inspiration

We know how easy it is to fall victim to financial scams. We see it every day, on the news. While we were lucky to get extensive education on how to recognize and take action on phishing and fraud, some people have not received that training. The loss of such large amounts of money can impact people's lives substantially, and we just wanted to make the world a more just place in the ways we could.

What it does

Cerberus functions as both a website and an extension. On the website, users can:

input the subject, sender address and body of an email. Our built-in phishing scanner will process the information and provide a detailed analysis of whether or not it is a malicious email.
input the content of other forms of communication, such as texts or social media messages, and receive the same analysis.
get access to an exclusive database of malicious emails. Once our system registers a malicious email, it will save the sender's address and alert other users who provide the same address.
receive a security score and ways to improve their financial protection! Our handy extension saves time and effort; instead of navigating back and forth to the website, you can install it and receive easy and ever-present access to our phishing scanner!

How we built it

We built the majority of the website using React JS and Javascript. For design, we used CSS, and we used a little bit of HTML for basic site functions. The phishing scanner: We instructed an LLM how to identify potential malicious emails and respond appropriately to the user with its conclusion. For this, we used Gemini API. The "blacklist": We kept a record of previously identified potential malicious sender email addresses, so if another user showed our program an email with the same sender, we could immediately notify them that the sender had been flagged in the past. To store data across user sessions, we created and queried a database in Firebase. The extension: We used Javascript, HTML, and CSS to create the extension, after much trial and error (especially struggling with the new json file). We experimented with a lot of different methods before reaching a solution. The security score: Based on context from the user, the security analyzer suggests ways to improve your personal financial security to avoid financial losses.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some design challenges, such as how to manage text overflow and input. We managed to resolve the issues (with a lot of perseverance) and can look back and say that it was a valuable experience :) Building the extension. Both cosmetically and functionally, this was not an easy pursuit. None of us had ever created an extension before, but we thought it was a great feature, and we were determined to have it as a feature. We all worked together and used our unique perspectives to solve the problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to make our program a web extension. This is the first time any of us had done anything related to extensions, so we had to spend a lot of time on learning how to code with a json file and how to make our program access web-screens.

What we learned

We learned how work with React and how to create web extensions. We also learned how to work with Firebase in order to create a database for our blacklist emails. We also learned time management and task distribution skills which were essential for this project as it had numerous difficult components.