A team of six third-year students from the School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, named ‘Cyber Sena’, won the top award at the Smart India Hackathon 2018, for developing a secure system for the Ministry of Defence, Government of India. Their app enables easy transfer of data from one network to another through trusted sources. The team announced that they will soon meet the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to discuss the security system implementation. The team consists of ethical hacking enthusiasts who aim to provide secured external USB devices and prevent unauthorized access to the data copied on it.

“Four of our teammates were in information security and retrieval, so the team started to develop the security system. Our software verifies a newly inserted pen drive to see if it has been whitelisted (a list of specified and trustworthy pen drives). If it is decrypted without much difficulty, the pen drive can be used as any normal device. If the pen drive is not whitelisted, then it isn’t mounted on the system,” explained Asha A. R., one of the team members. 

“The team claims that the system provides 100% security and is independent of the operating system it is running on. The existing systems rely on cloud storage while this system works without any connectivity to any external networks and ensures secured data at any given point of time,” shared team member Sivaramakrishnan S. 

Smart India Hackathon 2018 was a grueling 36-hour hackathon held at 28 centres all over India, with over 100,000 students divided into 12,000 teams participating. About 340 problem statements had been provided by 28 Union Ministries and 18 state governments. The top 5 percent of teams were selected for the grand finale in 28 centres across India.