GPIP students contribute to privacy and security research
GPIP students contributes to privacy and security research Heading link
This summer, Victor Escudero worked for Associate Professor Chris Kanich as a summer intern through UIC’s Guaranteed Paid Internship Program (GPIP), which provides freshman students and transfer students with the opportunity to serve as paid interns during the summer months. He worked alongside fellow interns Marek Cwiek and Zaheer Safi.
Their main responsibility was working on a project of Kanich’s called Cloudsweeper, which provides tools to help users understand and control their risks online. Through the tool, users can identify and secure sensitive files, delete files that are no longer needed, and map out and display their remaining files.
“It was a great experience for my career; I had the chance to practice my technical skills and learn new ones,” Escudero said. “It is very different from classroom work.”
Escudero learned new frameworks, including React, which is a free, open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and learned additional programming languages, including HTML and CSS.
The interns worked on the front end, designing different pages and adding functionality.
In addition to their other duties in Kanich’s lab this summer, the interns provided technical help in evaluating a new privacy-preserving tool with Kanich’s PhD student Mir Ali Masood. Their work was included in a recently published paper, Unbundle-Rewrite-Rebundle: Runtime Detection & Rewriting of Privacy-Harming Code in JavaScript Bundles.
The paper was authored by Masood, Kanich, one of Kanich’s former PhD students, Peter Snyder, and Hamed Haddadi, the chief scientist of Brave Software, Inc.
The paper will be presented this month at one of the premier cybersecurity conferences, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer and Communications Security conference.
“We conducted a manual analysis of what Masood did with the script he wrote,” Escudero said. “We added the browser extension to about 30 websites to test if the script altered the user experience.”
“We could not have gotten things put together without their help,” Kanich said of his interns.
Escudero continued working in Kanich’s lab this semester and is focused on the server side of the Cloudsweeper application.
Escudero is from Quito, Ecuador, and enjoys the diversity of UIC. He is a member of the Google Developer student club and the UIC chapter of the Society of Hispanic Engineers. Escudero, like his fellow interns Cwiek and Safi, were transfer students to UIC. Escudero expects to graduate next spring.