🏆 Winner — Most Impactful · H0: Hack the Zero Stack with Vercel and AWS Databases
See what an owner sees.
A read-only tour with sample data — no account needed. Four stops: the vault, what the server actually stores, the release state machine, and the tamper-evident audit trail.
Demo environment with fictional sample data — nothing here is a real secret, and nothing you do on this page writes anywhere.
Ranked by what matters in a crisis
The importance engine scores every item from metadata alone — it never sees a secret. The top of the list is almost always the primary email: the key that unlocks most password resets.
| Item | Category | Importance | Goes to | Trigger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary email — jordan@example.com | 0.97 | Sam (spouse) | emergency | |
| Password manager master vault | Credentials | 0.94 | Sam (spouse) | emergency |
| Checking & bill-pay account | Banking | 0.88 | Sam (spouse) | emergency |
| Life & home insurance policies | Insurance | 0.81 | Alex (executor) | estate |
| Letter of instruction to executor | Instructions | 0.78 | Alex (executor) | estate |
| Mortgage & deed documents | Documents | 0.66 | Alex (executor) | estate |
| Utilities & household subscriptions | Subscriptions | 0.41 | Sam (spouse) | emergency |
| Family photo archive location + key | Documents | 0.35 | Sam (spouse) | estate |
This is everything the server has
Encryption happens in the browser: a per-item AES-GCM-256 data key encrypts the secret, then AWS KMS wraps that key. The row below is the complete server-side record for “Primary email — jordan@example.com” — ciphertext is all there is to steal.
One verified emergency, step by step
Every transition is a strongly-consistent compare-and-set on Aurora DSQL — shown under each step. Owner, verifiers, and the scheduler can all act at once and the machine still advances exactly once. If retries ever exhaust, the row lands back in ARMED.
- ARMED2026-06-27T14:02:11Z
Default-safe. Nothing is accessible.
The owner checks in on schedule; recipients hold links that resolve to nothing. ARMED is the state the system falls back to whenever anything is uncertain — including when concurrent writes exhaust their retries.
state = 'armed', version = 3 - PENDING2026-06-27T14:02:36Z
An emergency trigger fires.
A missed check-in (or a manual emergency) advances the machine. The transition is a strongly-consistent compare-and-set on Aurora DSQL — it succeeds exactly once, no matter how many actors race.
UPDATE release_state SET state='pending', version=version+1 WHERE id=$1 AND state='armed' AND version=$2 - GRACE2026-06-27T14:02:47Z
Grace window opens; verifiers are asked.
The owner is notified and can cancel with one check-in. Meanwhile N-of-M trusted verifiers independently confirm the emergency is real. No single person — not even a verifier — can force a release alone.
UPDATE release_state SET state='grace', grace_ends_at=$3 WHERE id=$1 AND state='pending' AND version=$2 - RELEASED2026-06-27T14:03:12Z
Scoped access opens — and stays reversible.
Recipients can now decrypt only the items they were granted. When the owner recovers and checks in, the version bump instantly invalidates every recipient token and the vault re-ARMs. Estate releases, by contrast, are permanent by design.
UPDATE release_state SET state='released', released_at=now() WHERE id=$1 AND state='grace' AND version=$2
Append-only, hash-chained, tamper-evident
✓ chain intactEach entry’s hash is SHA-256 of the previous hash plus the entry itself, anchored at a genesis of 64 zeros. This chain isn’t an illustration — it’s computed and verified by the same code that runs in production. Edit any line and the chip above flips red.
Caring for an aging parent right now?
Everything above was built for one moment in particular: the call comes, and suddenly you need their bank, their insurance portal, their email — and you need that access to end when the crisis does.
See Relay for caregivers →Want the full story?
Two minutes of video shows the live system doing everything above — including a multi-region failover.