Siddhant Shrivastava
June 22, 2019
Filed under “grot”
Context
Aung and I responded to the following interview soon after the National Blockchain Challenge 2019. This was a pivotal moment for me to understand the importance of this emerging technology in an emerging smart nation such as Singapore.
BlockBuster - Siddhant Shrivastava, Aung Maw, Sanskar Shrivastava, and Tarun Kumar Vangani | Post-NBC‘19 Interviews
Siddhant Shrivastava, Aung Maw, Sanskar Shrivastava, and Tarun Kumar Vangani participated in the NBC‘19 Hackathon recently, and we caught up with them after the event to ask them about how it went for them.
Their presentation is available on Google Drive.
Sid and Aung presented the technical and business pitches on the day of the Finale. Their project, aptly named BlockBusters, bagged the first prize overall and the Vertical Prize in the Cybersecurity category of the inaugral event.
Enjoy the interview!
Brendan:
Hi!
Sid and Aung : Heya Brendan and our dear readers! Thanks for helping make BlockBuster the blockbuster project in the inaugral National Blockchain Challenge 2019 😊
Brendan:
Tell us a bit about your project…
Sid and Aung: Before we do that, we must tell that we took the ‘you are allowed to pivot your idea at any time’ rule too seriously and ended up changing our project idea thrice (right up until the evening of Day 2)! Even the name of the project went through two major iterations (formerly called BlockBox - which was an unimaginative play on the black box nature of blockchain and “The Box” from the HBO show ‘Silicon Valley’) 😂
But it all ended up working out for the best as our final idea of BlockBusters closely matched our original idea of securing decentralized systems, such as Internet of Things Devices using a decentralized technology such as the Blockchain.
Here’s the elevator pitch - “BlockBuster detects the tampered blocks of data in any storage system and recovers the original data back for you, even in the case of cyber-attacks.”
BlockBuster is a cyber-physical security solution for securing time-series databases through the principles of Blockchain and Distributed Systems. The prototype for the hackathon focuses on tamper-proofing the centralized database of a sample Power/Energy System with six stages. It is common for Critical Infrastructures of a city to have these centralized databases which are prone to cyberattacks and modifications. This makes the task of forensic investigation about the attack quite intractable. BlockBuster solves this issue of data-tampering of this centralized ‘historian’ database by enforcing replication and immutability of data (and hence ‘busts’ the harmful effects of attacks on the valuable plant operation data). BlockBuster replicates data across storage nodes to verify and recover the data in case the database is tampered with after a cyber-attack takes place. BlockBuster also works with existing attack detection techniques and enhances the integrity and availability of security devices themselves so they can be used for useful forensics and reconnaisance. Future plans include adding a service like Torus to establish a blockchain-based access control thereby bringing confidentiality to BlockBuster. For the prototype, we use a private Ethereum account, but the design of the system is generic enough to scale across a full-fledged operational plant, smart home, hospital, or a city using permissioned or public Ethereum or other blockchain networks as well.
Brendan:
What I found interesting about your project was your focus on leveraging the properties of a blockchain as an immutable ledger, as well as having multiple redundant copies of the data, to allow a system to recover when some of the nodes have had their data corrupted by bad actors.
Could you elaborate more on that?
Sid and Aung: Sure thing, Blockchain For The Win! Hackathons are a show-and-tell, so we’d rather show it to you. Watch the demo here!
Brendan:
Was that the idea that you originally started with, or did you change things along the way?
Sid and Aung: We pivoted our idea thrice during the hackathon - Smart Homes, Access Control, and then ended up on Critical Infrastructures. It is important to describe our workplace here since it inspired all of these ideas -
We are both researchers in Prof. Aditya Mathur’s group at the iTrust Centre for Research in Cyber Security, Singapore University of Technology and Design. Our daily work focuses mainly on security in the design phase of Critical Cyber-Physical Systems, devising techniques to generate attacks, predict attacks, defend against these attacks, and also playing around with explorable security labs in Mixed/Virtual Reality. The lab has scaled-down versions of a city’s water treatment plant, water distribution plant, a power grid, and an Internet of Things Testbed. The interconnected nature of these testbeds help us study realistic scenarios of cyber-physical attacks on a city like Singapore.
In fact, one of the judges appreciated how a project like BlockBuster could have been used to assist in the attack detection and forensic investigation during the SingHealth cyber attack in 2018.
Brendan:
Do you intend to continue working on the project, now that the hackathon is over?
Sid and Aung: Oh yes, indeed. In fact, Dr. Rex from BANSEA motivated us to ship the project in some form as soon as possible and we are working on it as we speak.
The big idea that we see here is that BlockBuster can be used for securing security devices themselves, thereby making the “Who Watches the Watchmen?” problem easier to solve. Its decentralized nature makes it extremely computationally intensive to be attacked.
Brendan:
Was there anything new that you learnt during the hackathon?
Sid, Aung, Sanskar, Tarun: That’s a rhetoric question! All of us had different motivations during the event - but were united by the love for learning (after all we were at the Lifelong Learning Institute!).
Ever since he saw the flyers for the event in the SUTD elevators, Sid wanted to learn more about Blockchain and relate it to cybersecurity (coming from a background in Computer Science, Design, and Virtual Reality). It was Aung’s and Sanskar’s first hackathon ever (and they ended up winning it!). Sanskar had just finished high school at the time of the hackathon and wanted to learn about how hackathons work and also got to dabble in vector graphics design. Tarun is exceptionally talented at machine learning and Python and wanted to branch out into this new promising technology through this event.
But technical skills aside, we learned a lot about hustling, public speaking, sharing responsibility and ownership. In the spirit of Blockchain, we were a very efficient distributed and decentralized system ourselves throughout the event!
Brendan:
Did you attend any of the workshop events that were held in the lead up to the hackathon?
Sid and Aung: Yes, we interacted quite a bit with the mentors, judges, and organizers all throughout the event as well. It was heartening to see the CEO of a company make changes to their product’s API (in production worldwide) on the spot so we could use it conveniently.
We are fortunate that the events that we could not attend were recorded and livestreamed so our other teammates could get up to speed. Kudos to Engineers.SG!
Brendan:
What did you think about the hackathon in general?
Sid: Exceptionally well-organized for its first season. The organizers pulled it off as veterans in the field of organizing hackathons. The Slack channel was a treat to watch with an extremely high signal to noise ratio which is pretty rare for such events. A huge shoutout to Wing, Brendan, Daniel, Lewis Wong, who went out of their way to make our project better and understand our schedule.
Besides that, the venue (Lifelong Learning Institute) was quite hassle-free and spacious to work at. All the logistics issues were well-taken care of. The mentors and judges were quite friendly and motivating. The mini-hackathon in the form of the gamified checklist did push us to learn some Business concepts (things we do for SWAG!)
Brendan:
What was your favourite part about the hackathon?
Sid and Aung: The public speaking opportunity with the luminaries in the audience, hands down! There were not only CEOs and CTOs, but also people who get to decide a lot of policies around the region. To convince them that our project is worthwhile and get their positive feedback is an immense confidence boost for us to proceed further on this journey to help Singapore become the Cybersecurity powerhouse that it aims to become through the Digital Defense initiative. It is heartening to see a bubbling blockchain brotherhood of sorts in our little Red Dot with frequent meetups and startups in this space. Events like this, where a six year old kid can present a business pitch to such an audience, are exactly what we need to make Singapore greater in the tech scene (that was also our favourite part, by the way!).
Brendan:
If we were to hold the hackathon again, what did you think could be improved?
Sid and Aung: Not much really, this is one of the better-organized hackathons that we’ve been to. We especially liked the rewards design of the hackathon where the top three prizes have the same prize money (our position among the winners notwithstanding 🙃). We’d recommend this and other events organized by the Global Tech Challenge to anyone (and even try participating in them)!
Brendan:
Thank you
Sid and Aung: You’re the best Brendan! Thanks for the interview and this unique opportunity :+1:
We were quite excited to see all of the cool projects that were built
during the event, and hope that you continue building them.
For many participants, this event was not just about the competition, but also about the learning.