FileMaven

Inspiration

We are part of a club known as CyberWVU as part of West Virginia University. When we came to HoyaHacks 2025, we wanted to know what a Hackathon would be like and what we could learn from it. We decided to create something which could be useful for everyone by virtue of improving file security, and the idea of FileMaven was found.

What it does

FileMaven is a web-application that accepts files from the user and scrutinizes a limited set of metadata for unusual or corrupted parameters. It then provides users with a report of their file data, using the obtained metadata to generate a perceived risk level for the file to be run/opened.

How we built it

We split our group of 4 into two parallel teams - one using Svelte, HTML and CSS to build the frontend and the other using Python to build the backend. Both teams worked back and forth with each other to develop the application in tandem with each other.

The frontend was made using Svelte and tested by using Node.Js. We designed API calls from the Python backend using Flask, and relied on libraries like Watchdog to design the responsive aspects of the backend.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first Hackathon, both as a team and as individuals. As such, we faced a lot of issues which we hadn't encountered before or thought of, including working with unfamiliar API framework, communicating between frontend and backend, using Vercel as our frontend hosting service, and integrating code between 2 different languages for our framework.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first experience working in a short time-frame to bring something of this scale to life, and we are all proud to create a frontend that accepts files from the user and feeds them to the backend for processing, where files are parsed to analyze their metadata.

What we learned

We learnt many things over the course of the Hackathon, mainly regarding how we should plan our future Hackathon projects. We learnt the importance of knowing how to work with APIs and integrating the entire project, and many better practices for developing web-applications.