NetSentinel

Inspiration

I kept hearing about cyberattacks and wondered why firewalls run on the same software they're supposed to protect. If the OS gets hit, the firewall goes down with it. That got me thinking about pushing detection down to the hardware level instead.

What it does

NetSentinel monitors network packets in real time and flags attacks like port scans and DDoS attempts. A Python dashboard shows what's being detected, which IPs are suspicious, and when attacks happened.

How we built it

The detection logic is written in Verilog — it watches incoming packets and classifies them using a state machine. Python sits on top to display everything in a readable dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out the right thresholds was tricky. Like how many packets per second actually counts as a DDoS? Getting the Verilog and Python to talk to each other cleanly also took a while.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the state machine to correctly tell attacks apart without too many false alarms. And just finishing a hardware security project solo — that was a lot.

What we learned

How to actually design stateful logic in Verilog, and why hardware-level security matters in ways that software just can't replicate.

What's next for NetSentinel

Brute force detection, auto IP blocking, and deploying on a real FPGA board.

Built With

• python
• verilog