The original goal for this project was to track packets being sent from smart speakers, or other smart home applciances, to try and determine if any sort of data exfiltration was occuring. As we continued working on this project we felt like these tools may be of interest to anyone that was curious where their devices were connecting to.
After this realization we pivoted to making the project more user friendly, creating a web UI that allows for easy interaction with our tools. Better visualization was also done when creating graphs, leveraging Javascript libaries to make for easier understanding of the data.
We are two masters students of Computer Science currently studying at UC Davis.
Tyler: I am a second year masters student with a strong interest in cyber security. I am a member of the cyber security club here at Davis where I participate in cyber defense and penetration testing competitions with the team. My interest in cyber security was an initial driving factor in this project as I was interested in seeing whether at home "smart" appliances were behaving well or not.
Jason: I'm a second-year master's student at UC Davis with past research and work in Networks and Computer Vision. My current master's research is centered around Networks, and I'm particularly interested in continuing to work in this field. Since I had past work in IT, I was already very interested in networks and traffic. This project was a way to put my curiosity to work and continue diving deeper and gaining more knowledge in this field.