Design and Development of an Integrated Secure Data Erasure and Advanced File Recovery Tool for Digital Forensics and Data Sanitization
National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) · Blockchain & Cybersecurity · Software
The spec is excellent and the carving half is achievable, but handle SSD sanitisation correctly rather than treating it like an HDD — that distinction is the trap, and getting it wrong signals to an NTRO judge that you missed the actual hard part.
What it actually is
Organisations need to both securely destroy sensitive data so it cannot be recovered, and recover deleted evidence during investigations — and today these take separate tools with limited device support. The ask is one platform combining secure drive and file erasure with forensic-grade file carving and recovery, across many storage types and file systems, with verification and audit reporting.
What to build
A unified platform with three modules: a secure drive eraser sanitising HDDs, SSDs, USB drives and memory cards to recognised data-destruction standards with verification, audit logging and tamper-resistant certificates; a secure file and folder eraser for selective deletion that removes metadata and residual traces with batch operations and verification across file systems; and an advanced file carving and recovery module recovering deleted files from formatted, damaged or corrupted media using signature-based and structure-based carving, reconstructing fragmented files without file-system metadata, with automatic classification and confidence scoring of recovered files.
Smallest thing that wins the room
Securely wipe a USB drive and show the verification pass confirming the data is unrecoverable with a tamper-evident certificate, then on a separate formatted drive run the carving module and recover deleted image and document files by signature, each with a confidence score.
How crowded this one gets
A guess, projected from the 2025 statements — the last year where both the submission counts and the winners were published.
Quieter than 83% of the 226 · #39 of 226 by expected field
Few teams are likely to go here. The best odds on the board come from statements like this.
Why: defence, intelligence and space bodies drew small fields.
This is a guess, not a fact
Nobody has published 2026’s numbers yet. This is an analysed estimate from last year’s pattern, so please do not take it as the truth — check the live counter on the SIH portal before you decide anything. The range covers the middle half of likely outcomes, so one statement in two lands outside it. Entry closes at 500 ideas per statement, so no range goes past that — a statement that reaches the cap fills and shuts rather than drawing an unlimited crowd. The model reads only three things a team can see before choosing — software or hardware, the theme, and what kind of body posted it — and those explain about a quarter of the variation in last year’s field sizes (R² 0.25 on held-out statements). Trust the band more than the number, and the ordering more than either. It cannot see how good your idea is, which is the part that actually decides it.
The scores
The number is the shorthand. The line under it is the reason.
Acceptance potential
3/5The specification is excellent and the forensic domain thins the field, but strong open-source tools already exist for both halves so your novelty is the integration, SSD sanitisation is a genuine technical trap most teams underestimate, and NTRO judges will know exactly where the hard parts are.
Feasibility
3/5File carving by signature and secure overwriting are well-understood with reference implementations like PhotoRec and shred to learn from, but SSD sanitisation is genuinely hard because wear-levelling means overwriting does not reliably erase, fragmented-file reconstruction without metadata is a difficult research problem, and doing all three properly is a lot of low-level systems work.
Innovation scope
3/5Both erasure and carving are mature fields with established techniques, so the integration and the fragmented-file reconstruction are where genuine room exists, but the core methods are prescribed by standards and prior art.
Clarity
5/5The description specifies three modules with their exact required capabilities — the device types, the standards compliance, the verification and audit requirements, the carving techniques and the fragment reconstruction — leaving the deliverable precisely defined.
Effort
MassiveThree low-level modules spanning drive sanitisation across device types, metadata-aware secure deletion across file systems, and forensic carving with fragment reconstruction is a large systems-programming effort.
Demo-ability
MediumRecovering deleted files by carving is a satisfying visible result, but the erasure side proves a negative — that data is gone — which is inherently harder to show convincingly.
In its favour
- Green flag: The requirement is fully specified across all three modules, so there is no ambiguity about what to build
- Green flag: Reference open-source tools like PhotoRec and shred exist to learn the core techniques from rather than inventing them
- Green flag: A tamper-evident erasure certificate to a recognised standard is a concrete, credible artifact for a forensic audience
- Green flag: The forensic domain and low-level nature guarantee a thin field
Against it
- Red flag: SSD wear-levelling means overwriting does not reliably sanitise, and a team that treats SSDs like HDDs makes a fundamental error a forensics judge will catch immediately
- Red flag: Fragmented file reconstruction without file-system metadata is a genuinely hard research problem that teams underestimate and usually skip
- Red flag: Mature open-source tools cover both halves already, so your novelty rests entirely on the integration and reconstruction quality
- Red flag: Proving secure erasure means proving unrecoverability, which is a negative that is hard to demonstrate convincingly
What you will be writing
- File carving (Scalpel / PhotoRec-style signature + structure)
- Secure overwrite (NIST 800-88 / DoD standards)
- ATA Secure Erase + SSD sanitisation handling
- Fragmented file reconstruction
- Recovered-file classification + confidence scoring
- Tamper-evident audit certificate generation
- Digital forensics
- Data sanitization
- File recovery
Prior art to read before you start
forensic file carving and recovery · standards-compliant secure erasure · fragmented file reconstruction
Analysed by Claude Opus. Every score above is a judgment call with its reasoning attached — kindly cross-check this against the official statement on the SIH portal before your team commits to it.