PollSafe

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  Pollsafe poll

Inspiration

We were brainstorming a service that will truly change the world for the better by letting everyone express their opinions freely. Eventually, we came across the idea of a polling website which would make it much easier for citizens living in countries with oppressive or overbearing governments to support a cause with the guarantee of anonymity and safety.

What it does

This app uses a sophisticated two-step end-to-end encryption system to make sure that only poll participants know what position they took, not the government or any other third party. The app first adds extra characters to users' responses to polls to jumble them up, then uses sophisticated AES encryption to make them even more secure. In our opinion, the most innovative part, however, is that it sends a CAPTCHA representation of the key, rather than the key itself. This ensures that computer algorithms intercepting private internet connections cannot get hold of the key and decrypt the rest of the data, and only a human can decrypt the result by reading the CAPTCHA associated with it.

How we built it

We first planned out the logo for our website, and planned out layouts by programming in HTML and CSS. Next, we started the Javascript portion and set up Node.js servers to handle responses and logins. Then, we refined the app and implemented the encryption and captcha implementation at the end.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part by far was setting up the server-side aspect of the project. It required tons of effort to set up the server-side node.js files to communicate with the client.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of having considerable success in advanced and previously unexplored topics, such as cryptography, SQL databases, and server-client communication.

What we learned

We are all relatively new to programming, and we collectively expanded our horizons and worked together to discover solutions to novel problems. In particular, we learned about how to program in SQL and develop a server-client web application.

What's next for PollSafe

We are considering making this idea into a nonprofit. Through this, we could use our idea to reach as many people as possible and make a meaningful mark on the world.

Built With

• html5
• javascript
• node.js