Inspiration
The three of us came at this from different angles but landed in the same place. Eshaan started self-hosting servers in middle school, setting up TrueNAS, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and doing authorized penetration testing. The more he learned about how easy it is to break into systems, the more frustrated he got that normal people have zero tools to protect themselves. Aryan watched his parents store everything in Google Drive, tax returns, medical records, family photos, because they didn't know there was another option. Every time a breach hit the news they'd just shrug because it felt like there was nothing they could do. Moksh kept seeing incredible security tools that nobody outside of tech could actually use. The knowledge exists, the technology exists, but it's locked behind a wall of complexity that shuts out the people who need it most. VaultGuard came from all three of those frustrations. We wanted to build the thing that finally gives everyday people a real way to own and protect their digital lives without needing a computer science degree to do it.
What it does
VaultGuard is a personal, plug-and-play data vault that lets everyday people take full control of their digital lives. At the core is VGS (Vault Guard Secure), a custom Linux-based operating system that runs on a small, low-power device in your home. Your files stay local. They never touch someone else's server. On top of that, we built an AI-powered threat engine that pulls from known breach databases, monitors credential reuse patterns, and flags unusual file access in real time. For backup, we use encrypted peer-to-peer syncing so your data can be backed up to a family member's VaultGuard device with no cloud provider in the middle. The whole thing is managed through a clean interface that's as simple as Google Drive.
How we built it
The foundation is a hardened Linux OS optimized for secure local storage, containerized using Docker and Portainer for easy deployment. The threat detection layer uses machine learning for anomaly detection and integrates with breach databases to monitor for leaked credentials. The decentralized syncing component uses encrypted peer-to-peer protocols. For the user interface we're building with React.js and TailwindCSS to keep it clean and accessible. We prototyped the system on a Raspberry Pi to prove the concept works on low-cost, low-power hardware.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge is the tension between security and simplicity. Every time we add a layer of protection, we risk making the product harder to use, and that defeats the entire purpose. If VaultGuard isn't simple enough for someone's grandparents to use, we've failed. Another challenge is making AI threat detection lightweight enough to run on a small local device without draining resources or requiring cloud processing. We're exploring local AI models through tools like Ollama to keep everything on-device.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We won the BExSTEM 2025 Competition with this concept. We ran over 15 customer discovery interviews with real consumers and over 80% said they would pay for a product like this. We have a working prototype of VGS running on a Raspberry Pi. And honestly, we're proud that three high school students are building something that addresses a problem most adults feel completely helpless about.
What we learned
The biggest lesson was from our customer interviews. We went in thinking people would need to be convinced that data privacy matters. They didn't. Everyone already knows. The real problem is that nobody has given them a realistic way to act on it. That completely reframed how we think about VaultGuard. It's not about convincing people to care. It's about removing the barriers that stop them from doing something about it.
What's next for VaultGuard
In the next three months we're finishing the VGS proof-of-concept with a full UI and basic anomaly detection. In six months we're launching a public beta and implementing dark web scanning and alerting. Within a year we plan to release VGS 1.0 with full AI threat detection and P2P syncing, and launch the VaultGuard Mini as a pre-built plug-and-play hardware device. Long term, we want VaultGuard to be the default answer when someone asks "how do I actually protect my data?"
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