YapYap

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Inspiration

Could there be anything more relaxing than sitting in front of a fire on a chilly november friday evening? No? What if I tell you the fire you are warming your hands on is your deployment?! Not so cosy anymore right? You're probably wondering how it could have come to this? You do have a digital twin with all your systems, their software and a boatload of CVEs? Just because you have the data, does not mean it is easily accessible. With the current setup everyone from IT to management is drowning. That's where we are trying to help.

What it does

The complexity of the digital twin inspired us to create a dashboard targeted at management and IT. YapYap is designed to provide a high-level overview while also offering deeper insights when needed. In addition it also enable quick and effective responses by linking personnel whose areas of responsibility include the affected systems, and showing mitigation suggestions.

How we built it

Backend

The backend is written in Python using FastAPI. As our main data storage we used the provided Neo4J instance containing the digital twin. In order to gain performance increase we introduced a caching and aggregation layer using PostgreSQL.

Frontend

For the frontend we are using NextJS in combination with Typescript, integrating a mapbox to show all the affected locations in order to grasp a geographical overview.

Challenges we ran into

Before the challenge, we were unfamiliar with Neo4J, so first had to dedicate some time to understanding its concepts and functionalities before we could start planing our product. After we knew what we wanted to do, we ran into some performance issues regarding the queries, that's why we had decided to a caching and aggregation layer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Familiarizing ourself with unknown technologies and producing a viable product in a very short amount of time.
Taming the beast of cyber security

What we learned

Graph databases are actually quite nice for mapping complex relations
Cybersecurity is a huge undertaking and without the right tools (like YapYap) it can quickly