SOC Analysis · Cohort 1 finalist
Etigbue Adaeze Claret
Built ChronoTrace: Fix the Clock, Then Read the Crime Scene
Technical highlights
- In my demo, one log is over six hours off, so a 12-second attack looks spread across a whole afternoon and can be missed or misread.
In the finalist's own words, from their project submission.
SOC Analysis project
ChronoTrace: Fix the Clock, Then Read the Crime Scene
When a company is hacked, investigators rebuild the attack from logs, the diaries that computer systems keep. But every system has its own clock, and the clocks often disagree. In my demo, one log is over six hours off, so a 12-second attack looks spread across a whole afternoon and can be missed or misread. Analysts also lose hours to false alarms from harmless work like backups. ChronoTrace helps small security teams and students. I built a free Python tool, with nothing to install, that finds each clock's error by itself and checks its own answer a second way. It spots attacks by behaviour, tests harmless look-alikes on purpose and explains why it rejected them, and reads network recordings to show what data left and whether it arrived complete. Every finding links to the exact log line behind it. The result is clearer, faster, checkable investigations. Run it twice and the output is identical, so anyone can verify it. An interactive timeline shows the scattered events snapping into place. All demo data is made up. It builds on ideas from my earlier programme stages; this round adds the automatic clock fix, capture analysis, look-alike rejection and the viewer.
In their words.
This program taught me to look beyond the alerts and connect the evidence behind every attack. That experience changed how I see cybersecurity.
