When University most talented brains meet cybersecurity challenges... Thales congratulates the winner!
Thales’ Student Innovation Championship is a new competition launched in the fall of 2017, designed to challenge university students in Canada. The idea is to tackle problems in industry, while giving the students valuable insight into the problems real companies face every day.
Students had three weeks to work on an innovative solution that solves a theoretical customer challenge, then had 8 minutes to pitch the idea to industry representatives, in the hope of winning a $20,000 CAD prize for first place, $10,000 CAD for the second place, and $5,000 CAD for the third place.
The first annual Thales Innovation Championship took place on Saturday November 25th . This year the topic was Cybersecurity. The judges saw undergraduate students teams from the University of Toronto, Centennial College, Lambton College and Ryerson University. The day was exciting, and the judges left impressed by all the talent in the room.
The 2017 winning team is from Centennial College. Adrian Castillo, Asma Anika, Jacob Hoang and Yash Mashruwala presented the judges with their IoT Portal to the Cloud and impressed the judges with a combination of authentication, authorization and packet filtering all while thinking about cost and implementation.
Second place this year went to Centennial College’s Roman Kovtunvoych, Gilbert Ramirez, Ikshita Saray and Ramneek Singh, who presented a novel way of hashing data to help stop the spread of malware and decreasing the impact of malware activity.
Rounding out our top three is a third place prize awarded to Ryerson University’s Kevin Kasa, Amin Ismail, Jordan Vanriel and Waseef Shawkat. They presented a modular solution made up of a device management server, and IoT Proxy and a Cloud Cyber Security solution.
The teams have all been invited to tour the Thales Canada office in Toronto where they will be awarded their prizes.
Congratulations and thank you to all participants.
We also wish to thank the event sponsors: Richter, Lead sponsor; and Guavus.
We are all looking forward to next year’s competition!


2nd and 3rd winning teams