Web Reverse Engineering Challenge #

GitHub repository for the challenge I created.

Introduction #

This fall break, I returned to my old high school to teach my high school’s AP Computer Science (APCS) Class. The teacher is an old mentor of mine from high school. He gave me free reign over what I could teach about, so I wanted to go above and beyond.

I have done a lot of web scraping in the past with requests/bs4 and Selenium, but only in the past year did I get into fully simulating the interactions between the web client and server for applications that require authentication. Even for a high schooler, Selenium is trivial to learn, but really understanding what’s going on when a client authenticates with a server requires a little finesse. My goal for this class was to teach the basic intuition for replicating api requests with automated tools such as cURL or requests.

&Hacks Writeup #

This weekend I participated in the Annual William & Mary Hackathon. I gave a talk about my chrome extension, Bombparty Defuser. I met three people who had played the game before, and one girl came up to me after and told me her friend was mad at me for ruining the game for everybody. It’s gratfifying to know I’ve had an impact on the world even if it was something stupid like writing a cheat for a game. About 30 people came to my talk and we had a good time talking about building chrome extensions and reading the funny (angry) reviews on the chrome web store.

What is this #

In spring 2024, I did my school’s hackathon with my friends. The following is copied from our Devpost page for posterity.

We won the Best Financial Hack award, sponsored by Capital One, and recieved a prize of $600.

View Our Site, Capital Savvy! #

Why #

We are a group of close friends who are very passionate about machine learning and its application in real problem spaces. As financial transactions become increasingly digitized in the modern age, the attack surface for potential intrusions only increases. Platforms like Google Pay, Apple Pay, and mobile payment apps have provided convenience to consumers at the cost of security. In the field of machine learning, neural networks, a model inspired by the human brain, have seen growing usage due to their versatility and deep comprehension of high-dimensional data. Our group decided to implement an artificial intelligence based on a deep neural network to analyze financial transactions and detect fraud.