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SIH Buddyby Ganeev Singh
Dev

🔥 Roast My Pick · SIH26149

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)

Medium39/100

Reasonable choice. The scoreboard liked it. The scoreboard is not the one asking questions on the day.

Worth considering. 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. Roughly 70–160 teams are expected to go here.

The receipts

Every red flag on this statement, in full. These are the four places it bites.

  1. Exhibit A

    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

  2. It gets worse

    Fragmented file reconstruction without file-system metadata is a genuinely hard research problem that teams underestimate and usually skip

  3. Still reading?

    Mature open-source tools cover both halves already, so your novelty rests entirely on the integration and reconstruction quality

  4. And the finisher

    Proving secure erasure means proving unrecoverability, which is a negative that is hard to demonstrate convincingly

The damage report

Every score this statement earned, and what each one actually costs you.

  • Feasibility

    3/5

    Buildable. Not comfortably. There is a week in here you have not planned for yet.

    File 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

    3/5

    Mildly interesting. The novelty will not carry the room; the build has to.

    Both 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

    5/5

    The ask is unambiguous, which quietly removes your favourite excuse.

    The 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.

  • Acceptance potential

    3/5

    Middle of the pack. This statement will not win the room for you — you will have to.

    The 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.

  • Effort

    Massive

    A semester of work wearing a hackathon costume. Something is getting cut; decide what now, not in week five.

    Three 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

    Medium

    Demoable, if you rehearse it. Nobody rehearses it.

    Recovering 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.

  • Data

    None supplied

    No dataset comes with this one, so every accuracy figure you quote is a number about labels you invented.

    Nothing is provided with the statement. You are sourcing, cleaning and labelling it yourself, and that work is invisible in the demo but very visible in the questions.

The demo they will have already seen

Somewhere around 70–160 teams are heading here, and the description is doing the choosing for most of them. They will read the same brief, reach the same architecture, and build a version of the same demo you are planning. Being correct is the floor. If your five minutes could be swapped with the team before you and nobody in the room would notice, you have not picked badly — you have built predictably, which costs exactly the same and hurts more.

What survives

The ground worth standing on when the questions start.

  • The requirement is fully specified across all three modules, so there is no ambiguity about what to build
  • Reference open-source tools like PhotoRec and shred exist to learn the core techniques from rather than inventing them
  • A tamper-evident erasure certificate to a recognised standard is a concrete, credible artifact for a forensic audience

Nothing here is fatal. It is just the list of places this statement pushes back, and you now get to push there first.

Full analysis ↗Roast another

The framing is a joke. The findings are not — they are the same analysis on the statement page, and every line above is attached to a score or a fact in the record. It is one opinion with its reasoning attached, so argue with it before you trust it.