Proxy POSTNet

Inspiration

With the huge increase in data available on the Internet, there has been an unprecedented rise in corporate and personal digital surveillance of individuals around the globe. We want to prevent cyber-stalking of individuals while still maximizing freedom to all individuals equally across the Internet. We also wish to promote the mental well-being of Internet-users with the peace of mind from using this service.

What it does

Proxy POSTNet is a network of users who share access tokens to their various internet accounts. When users post on certain website, the content will be posted by a different account. The user knows where all of their posts are, but does not know the account info (username, password) of the account. Additionally, the accounts that post the message also do not know who used their account, hence it's untraceable. Each user also has the option of opting to provide their access tokens to the pool of accounts, making this service easily scalable and more robust.

How I built it

We started from the backend, building RESTful APIs, then focused on the frontend. The backend consists of a nodejs server running on AWS. There is a 3-legged OAuth process used for the user to provide his or her access tokens to the proxy network. The user is prompted to allow their access token to be given to the network, and if the user is currently not signed in, then the user must first sign in and then give authorization to provide their access token. The frontend is an HTML webpage created with Bootstrap and CSS that contains a form that POSTs their content to the desired site.

Challenges I ran into

The 3-legged OAuth process was the most challenging part of the project. It would've been fairly simple if username and passwords were saved to the database, but this is also an increased privacy and security risk. Also, the Twitter API is really confusing. Postman also wasn't easy with creating POST requests to Twitter.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finishing the project. Finally we made it! It's also nice to know that this system could increase equity and prevent cyber-stalking.

What I learned

How to provide authentication for users through access tokens. In discussing the pros the cons of survelliance versus freedom, we now have a deeper understanding of due process for individuals and legally of prosecuting individuals.

What's next for Proxy PostNet

Accommodate more sites to help users voice their thoughts without worrying about being bullied online. Expand the reach of Proxy POSTNet to more users in order to increase the pool of user accounts. Harden the cyber security of the databases to prevent hackers from stealing users' access tokens. Raise awareness for human rights and fight for equity for all individuals no matter which country they are from.

Built With

• bootstrap
• dynamodb
• html
• javascript
• twitter