URL Shortner - 1st Place Hawaii Annual Code Challenge 2022

The Challenge

We were tasked with creating a secure URL shortener for the state of Hawaii. The goal was to create a website that would allow state workers to create short URLs that would redirect to a longer URL. This would allow them to share links without having to send the entire URL. The website would also have to be secure and only allow state workers to create and view the URLs.

Out of the fourty-four teams that participated in the challenge, our team brought first place for the “Coded Solutions” category.

Security and Importance

The sharing of links has been a common vector of attack for malicious actors. Clicking a link with an unknown origin can lead to a device being compromised. Attacks of these category are called phising attacks, which are very powerful and have been known to take down major corporations such as Google (See Operation Aurora). Some malicious links are easily identifiable, however, when shared with a third party link shortening service, it becomes hard to tell friend from foe. Despite that fact, sharing full links can very quickly lead to clutter and disorganization. By using a known first-party url shortner with a identifiable domain, links shared via this trusted domain can be trusted to spread links. This trusted shortened link can now be used to easily distribute information safely.

Our Team

I worked together with Ethan Chung to develop the URL shortner. Since we only had a team of two, we both had to work on the front-end and back-end. We decided to use TypeScript and React for the front-end, along with Tailwind CSS for styling, and Figma for prototyping. For the back-end we used Node.js and Firebase for our database. This provided us with a responsive and secure website that was easy to develop and deploy.

Features

Shortened URL uses distinct lettering.
QR-code generator with icon customization.
Easy sign in with SSO
Analytics
Custom url

Source Code & Demo

Demo: https://ets-url-shortener.firebaseapp.com/
Github: https://github.com/HACC2022/bruh2023

This code is not currently being maintained, and thus the demo is not guaranteed to work.