Dr. Maruthi Inukonda secured top honors in CipherSprint hackathon

CCS Administration

Dr. Maruthi Inukonda, Scientific Officer at the Centre for Cryptography and Cybersecurity (CCS), IITH, secured top honors in CipherSprint hackathon (under the Government Agencies and Private Limited innovation track) at SHIELD 2026 organized by the Telangana Cyber Security Bureau (TGCSB), Hyderabad.

Maruthi presented two innovations from his research: FENCE, an on-premises network appliance (in TRL-6) that performs fine-grained encryption of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in logs using award-winning Partitioned Columnar Encryption, coupled with a SaaS platform for compact, analytics-friendly storage and real-time threat detection on privacy-preserved logs; and Reconia, a web service (in TRL-3) enabling automated forensic readiness drills at national scale through confidentiality-preserving reconciliations. FENCE's network-first approach makes it particularly effective in BYOD environments where deploying agents on end-devices isn't feasible. These innovations represent significant advances in privacy-preserving cybersecurity infrastructure and forensic readiness for large-scale deployments. The research was conducted under guidance of Prof. Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma, IITH with pilot deployment support from Mr. Jessy Bondla, IITH.