SIH26150: Development of a Multi-Vendor DVR/NVR Forensic Analysis Tool for Standardized Ac — SIH 2026 | Wynit

SIH26150: Development of a Multi-Vendor DVR/NVR Forensic Analysis Tool for Standardized Ac — SIH 2026 | Wynit

What they'll ask you

12

Generated from the brief's own wording and the competition's published rules, never from a guess about what this ministry prefers.

Specific sample forensic dump files from each named manufacturer?
The brief never answers this, so a panel will. Whatever you decide, say it the same way twice.
Exact legal standards or court admissibility requirements for the target jurisdiction?
The brief never answers this, so a panel will. Whatever you decide, say it the same way twice.
Has any part of this been shown at a previous event, hackathon or college project?
The guidelines are explicit: your solution must not have appeared in any previous event or programme, of any sort. A recycled project is what a team under time pressure reaches for.

9 morethe ones a panel gets to if there is time

The brief asks for device identification module. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26150 itself: Automatically identifies DVR and NVR models from major OEMs. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for acquisition and parsing. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26150 itself: Creates forensic images and parses proprietary file systems and video formats. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for recovery and validation. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26150 itself: Recovers deleted footage and generates MD5 and SHA-256 cryptographic hashes for evidence integrity. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for timeline and analytics. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26150 itself: Normalizes timestamps, correlates events across cameras, and runs AI-based object, face, and motion detection. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for reporting module. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26150 itself: Maintains chain of custody records and generates standardized forensic reports. The brief asks for it by name.
Where does your data come from: a published source, one you collect, or one you generate?
No dataset is attached to this problem statement, so sourcing it is part of the work and nobody told you that.
Why not use what already exists? Name the closest thing to this that is already running.
A team that has not named the alternative themselves is answering this for the first time in the room.
Which single thing will you demonstrate end to end, start to finish, with nothing skipped?
Ours, not a rule: a narrow thing that fully works survives questioning better than a broad thing that half works. If nobody on the team can name it, that is the finding.
Show me this working: the jury will check whether your platform supports at least five to six specified OEMs like Dahua, CP Plus, and Hikvision, parses proprietary file systems, recovers deleted recordings, and ensures evidence integrity using MD5 and SHA-256 hashes.
This is the evaluator read for your problem statement, decoded from the brief's own wording.

The government's original description (431 words)

• Background Digital/Network Video Recorders (DVR/NVRs) are widely used for surveillance in government agencies, law enforcement, critical infrastructure, businesses, and residential environments. Major DVR/NVR manufacturers such as Dahua Technology, CP Plus, Honeywell Security, TP-Link, Godrej, Uniview, HIKVISON, and Matrix use proprietary storage formats, file systems, metadata structures, and video encoding mechanisms. During forensic investigations, surveillance footage serves as crucial digital evidence; however, the lack of standardization across DVR/NVR vendors makes acquisition, recovery, analysis, and validation difficult. Investigators often rely on multiple vendor-specific tools, resulting in increased investigation time, inconsistent results, timestamp synchronization issues, challenges in deleted footage recovery, and difficulties in maintaining evidence integrity. Therefore, a unified vendor-agnostic DVR/NVR forensic analysis platform is required to provide standardized workflows for evidence acquisition, recovery, analysis, validation, and reporting. • Description The proposed solution aims to overcome challenges such as non-standard forensic acquisition methods, proprietary file systems and video formats, difficulty in recovering deleted or damaged recordings, inconsistent timestamps, limited event correlation across cameras, challenges in maintaining chain of custody, dependence on multiple tools, lack of standardized reporting, and limited use of intelligent video analytics. The tool should support major DVR/NVR OEMs including Dahua Technology, CP Plus, Honeywell Security, HIKVISON, TP-Link, Godrej, Uniview, Matrix, and other commonly used platforms. It should automatically identify DVR models, parse proprietary file systems, create forensic images, extract videos and metadata, decode proprietary formats, recover deleted footage, normalize timestamps, generate cryptographic hashes (MD5 and SHA-256), correlate events across cameras, maintain chain-of-custody records, generate reports, and perform AI-based analytics such as face, object, and motion detection. Key modules include Device Identification, Acquisition, File System & Format Parsing, Recovery, Timeline Analysis, Reporting, and Machine Learning. • Expected Solution The expected outcome is a software-based forensic platform capable of performing standardized acquisition, recovery, analysis, validation, and reporting of surveillance evidence across multiple DVR/NVR vendors. The solution should support at least five to six major DVR/NVR OEMs (Dahua Technology, CP Plus, Honeywell Security, TP-Link, Godrej, Uniview, HIKVISON and Matrix), provide a unified forensic workflow, reduce dependency on vendor-specific tools, automate evidence acquisition and analysis, improve deleted video recovery, ensure evidence integrity and admissibility, and generate comprehensive forensic reports. Deliverables include a comparative analysis of major DVR/NVR OEMs (Dahua Technology, CP Plus, Honeywell Security, TP-Link, Godrej, Uniview, and Matrix), DVR/NVR forensic Image, system architecture documentation, a functional prototype, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), validation reports, user manuals, and a final project report. The tool should successfully parse proprietary file systems, decode video formats, recover deleted recordings,verify evidence integrity through cryptographic hashing, generate standardized reports, reduce analysis time, and produce reliable and legally defensible forensic results.