SATGUARD Team and Project GÖK-KİLİT

Our school, Şehit Hakan Gülşen Anatolian Imam Hatip High School, located in the Menemen district of İzmir, is home to inquisitive and research-oriented students who, in January 2025, formed the SATGUARD team. Our team is a high school-level student group competing in the TEKNOFEST 2025 “Secure Satellite Communication Competition,” developing solutions in the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and wireless communication. As a team, we pursue projects centered on digital independence in Türkiye, local hardware usage, and forward-looking technological innovation. Despite every challenge, we persistently strive to improve ourselves with determination.

_{SATGUARD Team During Project Development (Eymen Kurt)}

Year 2025. We had no idea that while eating simit and cheese in the school cafeteria, we would be opening a door to space. Yet here we are: we have reached the TEKNOFEST semifinals with our project named GÖK-KİLİT. It all began when Burak Selim Gündüz one day in the cafeteria asked, “How can we protect satellite ground stations from cyberattacks?” At that time, other teams were building drones, while we wondered, “Are we overthinking this?” No—we had barely thought enough...

When forming the team, our first goal was simply to “Do something different.” Our idea of combining cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and hardware was a bit crazy, but we wholeheartedly believed in this madness.

Utku, even though he was only in the 10th grade, kept running around saying, “My AI model is working!” Meanwhile, Eymen would say, “I can crack this encryption, but it’s unethical—I’ll write something better!” and spent day and night researching blockchain.

As the project progressed, everything spiraled out of control: Jetson Nano had to recognize faces, the OTP system needed to generate QR codes, and ESP32 had to transmit data. What was the funniest part? Do you know?

One day, during a facial recognition test, Burak did not look directly at the Jetson camera, so it failed to recognize him. The Jetson screen displayed: “Access denied – User not recognized.” Burak said, “So even robots don’t recognize me anymore...”

“You’re only 16—why are you meddling with satellites?” our teachers said. But at 16, we wrote a six-layer security system. And now we are in the TEKNOFEST semifinals. This story is about those who had the courage to begin.

When we first held Jetson Nano, we were thrilled. But when we powered it on, we noticed something: Jetson seemed to run on prayer rather than RAM. One day, while Burak was installing OpenCV, the system crashed. When he tried reinstalling it, the power adapter burned out. At that moment we said:

"Let’s forget facial recognition—it doesn’t even recognize our faces anyway."

Still, we did not give up. We upgraded the RAM, rebuilt the system from scratch, encountered errors again, but each time we rebuilt it. Because we believed in this project.

The ESP32 was the entity that tested our team’s nerves. One day it would send data, the next it would ask, “Was there even Wi-Fi here?” While trying to connect to ESP32, Eymen said, “I no longer trust myself—I trust the ESP less.”

But we did not quit. We visualized data with Node-RED, installed MQTT broker, and controlled LEDs from our mobile phones. Sometimes when the ESP32 worked, we all applauded. Those cheers were the sound of real, small victories.

One day the system worked—but only the facial recognition part failed to load OTP. The next day OTP loaded but Jetson crashed. That day we realized: We are not just building a project—we are learning patience.

We did not start this project just to win a competition;

• How is a real security system built?
• How do we prepare for future cyber threats?
• We began this project to experience these questions firsthand.

Terms like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and post-quantum cryptography may sound like “university projects.” But we learned them in high school, between classes, late at night at the computer, amid lines of Python error messages.

• Burak: Team captain. The one who says, “Let’s rebuild it,” whenever Jetson crashes.
• Eymen: King of Crypto. Solved every system from GPG to Hyperledger.
• Utku: In 10th grade, but if Harvard offered an AI course, even they would listen.

This is our team!

• We became semifinalists at TEKNOFEST.
• Our project score is 75.98.
• Our greatest achievement: Trusting the system we built.
• Jetson recognizes faces, OTP receives data, blockchain logs it, and PQC encrypts it—all done by us.
• We started with an idea. Sometimes the adapter burned out, sometimes we did. But we never let the idea die.
• We are SATGUARD, a small high school team formed to protect the sky. But believe us, our goal is the stars...
• We did not just write code. We dreamed a dream together—and now that dream is looking up at the heavens.