INCORPORATING PRIVACY AND SECURITY FEATURES IN AN OPEN SOURCE SEARCH ENGINE A Project Report Presented to

The aim of this project was to explore and implement various privacy and security features in an open-source search engine and enhance the security and privacy capabilities of Yioop. Yioop, an open-source PHP search engine based on GPLv3 license, is designed and developed by Dr. Chris Pollett. We have enabled a crawl, search and index mechanism for hidden services by execution of codes, which has facilitated access of the Tor network in Yioop. We have diversified the ability of the previously supported text CAPTCHA functionality in Yioop by implementing hash CAPTCHA and provided feasibility to toggle between text CAPTCHA and hash CAPTCHA. To enable the user to log in to his or her respective Yioop account without sharing the password over the network, we have incorporated zero knowledge authentications in which Yioop does not store the user’s real password, but it stores the numerical password, which is derived from the user’s original password.