‘Students develop secure pen drive to avoid data theft’

NEW DELHI: A group of students backed by the HRD Ministry have developed a “secured pen drive” for the ISRO which can only be used on one system and will corrupt the data if used on a different system.

The team from Tamil Nadu, which developed the pen drive to prevent data theft, was among the finalists of Smart India Hackathon, a non-stop digital product development competition where problems are posed to engineering students for innovative solutions.

“The students have developed a secure pen drive which will not work in another system and keep the data safe. This problem of data theft was posed by the ISRO,” HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said while announcing the second edition of Smart India Hackathon.

According to the product description, the USB flash drive firmware will act as HDI (Human Interface Device) called a bad USB. This will allow to reprogramme the micro controller to ac as a HID/ keyboard and perform custom keystrokes on target machine.

“From smart pen drives, to airport cargo management, to creating a market place for north east handicrafts, to help cultivating healthy habits, to helping dementia patients,there is no dearth of creativity from young minds of our country and hence the second edition is being launched,” Javadekar said.

However, unlike last year this edition will have two parts -- hardware edition and software edition.

“We have received participation from 27 central ministries/departments and 17 state governments who have sent more than 900 problem statements. After scrutinising these problem statements, 408 problems (340 for software and 68 for hardware) were finally selected for the Hackathon.

“We have received 17,400 teams with participation of around one lakh students of engineering, management and MCA. These entries were scrutinised and now 1,296 entries have been selected for the grand finale,” Javadekar added.

While the grand finale of the software edition of the Smart Hackathon will be held on March 30 and 31, the finale for the hardware edition will be held in June.

Prediction of load demand and power availability, comparison of different human voice samples and finding percentage of matching of the given samples, application to map disabled friendly locations, fire detection system, caste validity certification centre and an application for reporting encroachment, pollution or requirement of water bodies, are among the problems selected for the 2018 edition of the Smart India Hackathon.