Authorisation and Security

This is a narrower, more technical sibling of a general cybersecurity hackathon: instead of covering the whole security surface, the challenge is scoped specifically to identity and access, who gets to do what, and how a system proves it. Typical tracks include building a multi-factor authentication flow for a legacy system, designing a role-based access control model for a specific use case, or prototyping single sign-on across a set of internal tools.

The reason this works well as a standalone hackathon rather than folding it into a broader security event is that access management has a clear before-and-after: judges can compare a team’s prototype directly against the current, usually clunky, process it’s meant to replace. That makes scoring more objective and gives participants a concrete win condition instead of an open-ended prompt.

We typically pair this challenge type with mentors who have hands-on IAM experience rather than general security backgrounds, since the tooling and standards involved (OAuth, SAML, MFA providers) are specific enough that generic security mentorship doesn’t add much. Our agency page covers how we source mentors and judges for a technical track like this one.