Aegis

Inspiration

Aegis was inspired by the need for more trusted and transparent Canadian supply chains. In many industries, buyers and manufacturers need to prove where products come from, how much Canadian content they contain, and whether supplier claims can be trusted.

What it does

Aegis verifies supply chain attestations for Canadian product claims. The backend checks digital signatures, validates parent-child provenance links, calculates Canadian content percentage, assigns the proper designation, and detects anomalies such as tampering, missing parents, circular references, replay, timestamp issues, unit mismatches, and mass-balance violations.

How we built it

We built a FastAPI backend with a stateless /verify endpoint for the official scoring harness. The verification engine loads supplier public keys, anchor registry data, and statistical baselines, then processes the submitted supply chain as a graph. It uses canonical hashing and Ed25519 signature verification to validate attestations, graph traversal to check lineage, and cost aggregation to calculate Canadian content.

We also designed the backend to support a demo workflow with supplier registration, attestation storage, QR/product verification, and a React frontend served from the same backend container.

Challenges we faced

The main challenge was aligning the backend with the official hackathon schema while also supporting a demo system. We had to carefully separate the stateless scored /verify path from the database-backed demo APIs. Another challenge was handling edge cases such as replayed attestations, parent hash mismatches, circular references, and mass-balance violations without over-flagging valid chains.

What we learned

We learned how important canonical serialization is for cryptographic verification, because even small JSON changes can break a signature. We also learned how to model a supply chain as a graph and combine cryptographic integrity, provenance validation, and Canadian content calculation in one verification pipeline.

What's next

Next, we would improve the user interface, add stronger supplier onboarding, expand the anomaly detection dashboard, and integrate external registries or audit systems so manufacturers and buyers can verify product claims more easily.