Webalytics

Over the past few weeks of doing research here at the Security Lab at Stanford Univeristy, my mentor has been developing an analytic tool that we dubbed as “Webalytics.” This tool is actually just a firefox addon that dumps a great deal of information from your browsing session into a sqlite database that can be analyzed later. There is no interface, you simply install the plugin and surf the net and it will be working in the background. This plugin is currently experimental and we are running various tests with it as we speak. The website for the tool will be up shortly, and I will update this post then, giving the link.

If you are a brave soul, the current release can be tested here: Webalytics

Update:

Since this post was written, the project name was changed and the actual v1.0 release went live. Head on over to FourthParty.info to pick up a copy and try it out!

Most random post ever.

This post will be structured in no particular way and will incude me jumping from several topics with no transitions!

I am currently on the application phase for several universities, which is a much bigger pain in the butt than it was for undergrad studies. Nonetheless, I am almost done my first application which is for Northeastern University and have started my second application for Johns Hopkins University. These two have been picked mainly because:

1. Good Information Assurance programs
2. They are part of the Federal Cyber Security:Scholarship for Service, a scholarship program that pays full tuition, requiring you to work a couple of years doing security-related work for one of the govt agencies (which I want to do anyways, so big win there)

I have a few back up schools that I will be applying to, but hopefully I don’t need to rely on them

Anyways, the work that I have been a part of here at Stanford University’s Security Lab is actually picking up quite a bit of unexpected publicity. My mentor has been excited since day one, but I had my doubts! It is nice to know that our hard work is being accepted and taken seriously. For more info on Do Not Track, head on over to donottrack.us

• Our initial findings: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6694
• New history sniffing findings: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/669
• ConsumerWatchDog’s call to the FTC: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/ltrleibowitz071411.pdf

On other news, I have been testing a few new technologies lately in preparation for rolling out the new Scoobysworkshop.com design. This is the biggest webdesign project I have ever worked on, and there is a still a little bit of work left to do. So far, I have redesigned over 100 pages of old content that was mainly written really bad or used very old HTML and JavaScript techniques like Spry. I also had to optimize over 150 images that are used on the site to save bandwidth and reduce load times. As for the initial roll out, I am trying to convince my client to use a CDN, specifically Amazon’s Cloudfront. Testing this out on my personal website and I have seen a pretty big improvement. In addition, since this is a big website with lots of traffic, including a lot of malicious traffic, I decided to use a caching addon (w3c Total Cache) along with a website proxy. Cloudfront is what I am banking, and it hasn’t disappointing me yet! After only two days of implementing it on my website, it stopped traffic from 84 known bad requests, most likely spam bots. Also, their free plan is actually really good and has no bandwidth caps. I will report back with how things went after the website is rolled out!

Lastly, I updated my resume a few days to reflect my current goals. I am transitioning from looking for work to getting into grad school! That means my current resume will look very different from the previous, including a cleaner layout and exluding technical skills and all that blah blah blah. This doesn’t mean I’m not looking for new and exciting projects!

- Jovanni Hernandez