Unlocked
Four campuses, three countries, more than a thousand registered students, and one challenge with our name on it. Here's what they built when we asked them to stop trusting the admin.
Tide,
On 22 and 23 October 2026, the RMIT Hackathon ran in four places at once: RMIT Melbourne, RMIT Saigon South, RMIT Hanoi, and Taylor's University Lakeside Campus in Malaysia, which was hosting for the first time. More than 1,000 students registered. The theme was Security x Generative AI x Low-Resource Languages, and teams of four had a day and a half to make something of it.
Tide was the Industry Challenge Sponsor, and Challenge 2 was ours. We called it Tide UNLOCKED.
The brief
We asked one question: what can you unlock with TideCloak? Teams had to pick an app people would want but can't trust today, because someone (an admin, an operator, a server) holds too much power over it. Then they had to show how TideCloak changes that, so no single person can act alone.
Each team answered with a working prototype and a two-minute film.
What they built
The best way to get a feel for those two days is to read what the teams wrote. Here are a handful of the projects that came out of it.
Sealed Tender is a procurement portal where bids stay encrypted until three of five committee members sign to open them, so the procurement head, the database admin and any AI agent all have to wait like everyone else.
KinKey, by Team Parcheesi from Saigon South, is a two-key family wallet. When an elderly parent makes a large transfer, it waits for a second approval from a child they chose, so a phone scammer can't talk the savings out of the account.
Unfound is a safe-address layer for survivors of family violence. Schools, clinics and courts can still reach someone after they move, and no single employee, admin or operator can find out where they went.
CargoTrust, by Team Humblebee from Saigon South, is a gateway for semiconductor trade documents. Unlocking sensitive evidence takes both a supplier admin and an independent compliance officer.
FairEnrol, by Team GOAT, runs course registration through a quorum, so having database access doesn't make you the one in charge.
Keyless Agent is an AI assistant that can work with patient records but can never take them out on its own.
Care Passport is a medical record the patient controls, where access is granted and taken back one doctor at a time.
The threat is not a hacker. It is one person with legitimate access, doing one lookup.
That line comes from the Unfound brief, and it pretty much sums up the room.
The pattern
Read enough of the submissions and the same idea keeps coming up. Hardly anyone was worried about hackers breaking in. They were worried about the person who's already inside, like the admin who can edit a row, the operator who holds the key, or the AI agent with one permission too many. Over and over, their answer was that nobody should be able to act alone, and that authority should only show up when enough of the right people agree.
That's the idea Tide was built on. Watching students land on it by themselves, in three countries, in under two days, using problems from their own cities like rigged tenders, phone scams and family violence, was the best validation we could have asked for.
Winners
Campus awards were handed out in Saigon South and Hanoi at the end of the second day.
Thank you
Thank you to the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University and RMIT RACE for running it, to Taylor's University for joining as a host, and to our fellow partners DesignLive Technologies, Katalon and Orange Logic Vietnam. Thank you to the mentors and judges. And thank you to every team that spent a day and a half finding out what TideCloak could unlock. The roll below is yours.
All photos by RMIT University Vietnam. Full albums: Saigon South campus and Hanoi campus.
Film music: "Endless Sunrise". Music from #InAudio.