UIC Cybersecurity Internship

• Under the supervision of Professor Venkat Venkatakrishnan and Professor Rigel Gjomemo, I had the opportunity to work with graduate students to research in electronic security and privacy.

• The main goal of this internship was to identify specific vulnerabilities through PHP applications and prevent attackers from exploiting those vulnerabilties including the misuse of cross size scripting, breakthrough of firewalls, etc.

• Key Resources that were used over the course of this internship:

  • PHP - Hypertext Pre-processor, also known as PHP, is a front-end, user-friendly scripting language. PHP is commonly used to script websites through web applications including CE Phoenix, SO Planning, and others that support PHP for web designing.

  • Smarty Template Engine - Smarty is a template engine that is prevelant across any PHP web application. The purpose of Smarty is to help keep the template design (front-end) separated from the application programming role (back-end) from application logic.

  • VMWare Workstation Pro - A licensed software that is used to create virtual machines based on the amount of memory that your laptop occupies in the Hard Drive. The amount of memory determines the amount of processors, storage space, and other key criteria to build a virtual machine inside the computer.

  • Sublime Text Editor - Useful in finding superglobals that are used in a PHP application ($_GET, $_REQUEST, $_POST)

  • Ubuntu Terminal - Used the terminal in the Linux VM in order to download and send scripts to a host website created under my user directory in the VM

  • Microsoft Powerpoint - Used to create presentations to present to the Professor on a daily basis; Present different documentation of the Smarty Template Engine, and how it can be used in different PHP applications for different purposes

  • Zoom - Attend meetings on a daily basis with the team to talk about progress that we have made over the period of time