Kaspersky Lab announces winner of the Secur’IT Cup student competition

Kaspersky Lab’s global student competition, the Secur’IT Cup, is open to students from all over the world and from any academic background. Participants have the chance to win $10,000, as well as benefit from competing alongside like-minded students and building an understanding of what it is to work in the industry. This year students were tasked with coming up with ideas for security solutions that would support developments in healthcare, IoT and personal safety. The final round of the competition took place at Kaspersky’s Academic Partner Summit in Budapest where the final ideas were presented to a panel of judges made up of Kaspersky and industry experts. 27 students from Australia, Bahrain, France, Germany, India, Russia and the USA took place in the finals. Alisa Gazizullina and Vladislav Vinogradov won first place in the competition with their project “Crime Camera” - The Secure Intellectual Surveillance.

Alisa Gazizullina says about their win: “I took part in the finals last year and gained inspiration for my research by listening to the ideas of talented professionals, contest participants and academic summit speakers. Comprehensive feedback made me able to envision what in my project required to be improved. When I saw an announcement for this year’s competition, I shared it with my colleague who just recently started working on his video surveillance system for crime detection. I was doing a research on FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) and we started following recent updates in that area.

We decided to integrate Homomorphic encryption algorithms into the video surveillance system. This allowed us to transfer video data to the cloud in an encrypted form and run analytics over ciphertexts without decryption – a Secure Intellectual Surveillance system, running computations over ciphertexts ensuring client's data confidentiality, was born.

We are very glad to be the winners and are grateful that Kaspersky Lab’s support gives our project a future and a strong foundation to develop.”

Kirill Shiryaev, Head of Talent Acquisition at Kaspersky Lab says “the projects this year were all incredibly impressive with a lot of thought and knowledge having gone into them and all the finalists have the potential for a successful career in the cybersecurity industry. Picking a winner amongst such a quality selection was as challenging as ever but we particularly loved the combination of modern video analytics and state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms

Kirill continues: “the Secur’IT Cup competition gives young people the opportunity to explore the creativity a career in cyber security can offer and is just one of Kaspersky Academy’s initiatives to encourage young people to pursue a career in the industry.”

Kaspersky Lab also congratulated the runners up. Philipp Mieden from LMU Munich in Germany won the second prize of an all expenses trip paid to Kaspersky’s Security Analyst Summit in 2019, taking place in Singapore, with an open source project of Netcap Sensor & Collection Server.

The Kaspersky Academic Partner Summit invited our academic partners from universities around the world to come together and hear the latest updates from Kaspersky about the business and the threat landscape as well as our initiatives universities and students can benefit from. Delegates also had the opportunity to hear talks from Kaspersky experts and third party speakers on the latest cyber security topics.

For more information about the Academy and joining our initiatives, please visit: https://academy.kaspersky.com/