I’m very excited to announce the winners of our inaugural Pangea Securathon! Contestants competed for five different prizes totaling nearly $10,000 over the past two months. After the dust settled, we had nearly 350 participants and 30 qualified submissions!
We want to thank everyone who submitted and put the effort in to create a new application built with Pangea’s APIs. It’s so rewarding to see the innovation and effort that everyone put into creating a unique new app.
Our judging panel included our Co-founder and CTO Sourabh Satish, our Chief Product Officer Rob Truesdell, Senior Platform Engineer Akshay Dongaonkar, and myself.
Judging was based on four key parameters:
Technological Implementation - Does the interaction with the Pangea API demonstrate quality software development?
Design - Is the user experience and design of the project well thought out?
Potential Impact - How big of an impact could the project have on the Pangea community?
Quality of the Idea - How creative and unique is the project?
Without further ado, I’m happy to announce our five winners!
First Place Winner ($5000) - ZeroPay
ZeroPay was the unanimous choice by our judging panel as it demonstrated all of the qualities that we were looking for in a sample Pangea-built application. It showed how Pangea can help you deliver apps in a critical industry - financial services. Congratulations to the ZeroPay team!
ZeroPay is a digital payment platform which allows users to make payments, send money, and perform various financial transactions using their smartphones or other compatible devices. ZeroPay securely stores the user’s PIN via Pangea’s Vault Service, enabling users to make purchases online, in physical stores, and transfer money to other individuals.
Besides solving a vital problem in the financial services space, ZeroPay used the broadest set of Pangea services - a total of six!
AuthN - used for user registration and authentication
Redact - used for masking credit card numbers
Vault - used for secret and cryptographic key storage
Secure Audit Log - used for logging of user activities
IP Intel - used for identifying infected devices or malicious users
User Intel - used for checking for breached user accounts
Check out the entry here: https://devpost.com/software/zeropay
Second Place Winner ($2000) - RedPhish
RedPhish was an impressive second place finisher. We really liked the user experience and design applied to the challenge of securing interactions with websites. RedPhish embedded Pangea APIs into a browser extension for Safari and Chrome to provide internet users with instant verdicts on domains, IPs, file hashes, and URLs, enabling you to make informed decisions about website safety. RedPhish also works seamlessly with Gmail, providing visual markers on your inbox on the safety of links in each email.
The extension is available on the Apple app store and the Chrome web store, so anyone can check this out today. In addition to the user experience, market applicability, and general availability of the extension, RedPhish also has a great roadmap that will improve the adoption of their extension by making themselves available in more marketplaces, improving the payment flow of their app, making UI/UX improvements, expanding to support more email providers, and more.
RedPhish was built using four different Pangea services:
IP Intel - used the reputation API call to identify malicious IPs
URL Intel - used to identify malicious URLs
File Intel - used to identify malicious files
Domain Intel - used to identify malicious domains and websites
Check out the entry here: https://devpost.com/software/aquarium-1n8369
Third Place Winner ($1000) - Scan My SMS
We were excited about the idea and design behind Scan My SMS. Fraudulent, spam, and malicious text messages are an annoyance for everyone, but there isn’t a reliable and repeatable way to help a user distinguish a good text message from a malicious one. This is what Scan My SMS solves, and we liked the wide-reaching applicability to any mobile user.
The implementation of Scan My SMS is very clean, with good coding standards and appropriate usage of Pangea APIs. The user experience is also very clean and streamlined, and they do a great job of making it unmistakable to a user of any skill level whether a text should be trusted or not. Scan My SMS did a nice job of folding in the various Pangea Threat Intel APIs into a mobile use case for end users.
Scan My SMS was built using four different Pangea services:
IP Intel - used the reputation API to identify malicious IPs linked within the text message
IP Intel - used the geolocation API to identify country of origin of the IPs linked within the text message
URL Intel - used to identify malicious URLs linked within the text message
Domain Intel - used to identify malicious domains and websites linked within the text message
Check out the entry here: https://devpost.com/software/scan-my-sms
Best Open-Source Project ($1000) - The Guardian
We picked The Guardian for Best Open-Source project as a great example of using innovative technologies - generative AI + Pangea We appreciated The Guardian team for sharing their code with the community. The Guardian is a healthcare app that combines facial recognition with Pangea APIs to ensure a secure user experience.
The Guardian app makes practical and creative use of Pangea APIs by combining it with Generative AI in the following ways:
Usage of generative AI to summarize Pangea Secure Audit Log search results
Usage of generative AI to identify the user of the app (through webcam) which further determines on-screen information should be redacted or not
There are several other great features in this app - you can check out the entry here: https://devpost.com/software/the-guardian-ybt0fp
Most Creative Project ($500) - Safekey
Safekey is a great use case! The idea is really simple and practical (most great ideas are!) - A USB key that is used to encrypt or decrypt data in real time. When the USB key is removed from the laptop, documents or information that are tagged for encryption become encrypted - even if that document is open for viewing. When the USB is re-inserted, the contents become decrypted and they are readable.
The author is using the Pangea Vault API to back up the encrypt/decrypt keys in the event the USB is lost, damaged, or overwritten.
Check out the entry here: https://devpost.com/software/safekey-ra6ezp
Congratulations to all of the winners and make sure to check out Sourabh Satish’s blog coming soon on the technical factors that weighed into our decision!
Stay tuned, as we will be hosting another Pangea Securathon later this summer and we can’t wait to see what you build next!
