The Honeynet Project

Another year, another summer approaching (at least in the northern hemisphere), and the good news that everyone has was waiting to hear is that Google officially announced that Google Summer of Code will be happening once again in 2012. Great job again Google! :-)

Having really enjoyed our experience as a successful mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2009, Google Summer of Code 2010 and Google Summer of Code 2011, The Honeynet Project is very pleased to announce that we have once again been accepted as a mentoring organization for GSoC 2012 (note the changed URL for the official GSoC 2012 site).

The first GSoC 2012 deadline was Friday March 9th, which was the deadline for interested mentoring organizations to submit their org application, then March 16th, when Google officially announced which lucky organizations were selected to participate in GSoC 2012. You can read more about GSoC 2012 in the offical GSoC FAQ.

Potential GSoC students and other interested parties could find our list of project ideas. As in previous years, this list of proposed project ideas is not definitive, and we were/are also open to receiving and mentoring interesting and novel project ideas from students too. For the first time this year we also hope to post a public survey to allow any to suggest project ideas too. So if there is a research topic you are interested in working on this summer, please suggest it, or get in touch to discuss it further. To avoid disappointment and missed deadlines, if you are applying to GSoC this year, please make sure you submit your student application well in advance and don't leave it to the last minute!

The third and fourth milestones were student applications and acceptance. GSoC 2012 student applications began on March 26th at 19:00 UTC and closed on April 6th at 19:00 UTC.

On Monday April 23rd Google officially announced the list of the lucky 1211 students accepted to participate in GSoC 2012

You can find our GSoC ideas page and list of 15 accepted GSoC 2012 student projects here:

* GSoC 2012 Project Ideas
* GSoC 2012 Accepted Projects

If you want to get an idea of the kind of projects ideas we proposed and the accepted projects we ran during GSoC 2009-2011, you can view these here:

* GSoC 2009 Project Ideas
* GSoC 2009 Accepted Projects
* GSoC 2010 Project Ideas
* GSoC 2010 Accepted Projects
* GSoC 2011 Project Ideas
* GSoC 2011 Accepted Projects

To get a feel for how previous successful GSoC student projects are advancing our knowledge and capabilities and generating benefits in the read world, see:

* https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/android-reverse-engineering-toolset-debuts-110111
* http://www.scmagazineuk.com/open-source-malwr-analysis-tool-launched/article/224621/
* http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability-management/167901026/security/news/231600597/new-free-tools-simplify-analysis-of-android-malware.html
* https://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=11521
* http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability-management/167901026/security/vulnerabilities/231601546/free-honeysink-tool-captures-botnet-traffic.html
* http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability-management/167901026/security/news/221901483/free-tool-paints-picture-of-stealthy-attacks.html
* http://www.darkreading.com/database-security/167901020/security/news/221300001/new-honeypot-mimics-the-web-vulnerabilities-attackers-want-to-exploit.html

You can also find a copy of a recent presentation by our Chief Research Officer David Watson on our achievements during GSoC 2009 and GSoC 2010 here, which hopefully provides a good introduction to the Honeynet Project and our collective activities in recent GSoCs. You can also read/watch David's presentation at our last public workshop in Paris from March 2011.

If you have any questions, please drop by in our new #gsoc2012-honeynet IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and say "hi" (note you may need to idle there for a while before you get an answer to a specific question, as our members do have to sleep and come from timezones all over the world, so please be patient while we focus on geting our org application ready for the application deadline).

You can also find out about our recent Honeynet Project Annual Workshop 2012, which was held in Palo Alto, California on March 19th. Many of our members, mentors, org admins and previous GSoC students attend, and we hope to be able to meet at least a few potential students there and discuss ideas with you.

We still have our public mailing list for interested prospective GSoC students to get in touch and discuss project ideas for GSoC with the Honeynet Project - see https://public.honeynet.org/mailman/listinfo/gsoc for details. Please sign up if you have any questions about getting involved with the Honeynet Project in GSoC 2012.

Organisational Administrators

Our GSoC 2012 organisational administrators are:

So with East Coast/West Coast US, Europe and Australia covered we can hopefully offer students and mentors round the clock support again this year!

Why get involved with the Honeynet Project?

1. We are an enthusiastic and passionate group of volunteers dedicated to the ideals of open source and sharing our security research and development knowledge with the community
2. For over ten years, we have pioneered research in the field of honeypots, releasing many freely available tools, challenges and Know Your Enemy whitepapers that are often considered groundbreaking when first published
3. We literally wrote the book on the topic, and regularly present on our R&D activities at conferences all over the world
4. We have active volunteer member chapters in many countries and from many different backgrounds, with a wide variety of skills and experience they are happy to share
5. We have always been committed to the concepts of open source software and freely share everything we do, including each chapter publishing regular public status reports on their recent activity
6. We maintain active public and private communities of developers and researchers who use and contribute to our tools each day (for public examples, see our projects page and public mailing lists).
7. We provide our members and the community with the public and private infrastructure necessary to support distributed collaborative remote working, such as IRC channels, mailing lists, subversion repositories, Trac instances for ticket management and wikis, content management systems, blogs, live deployments with real end users for testing and regular feedback, etc
8. We are hands on, supportive and keen to involve more talented people in projects we are really passionate about
9. We have a strong track history of mentoring new members and successfully delivering open source projects, tools and research that demonstrably benefit the community
10. All of our GSoC 2009 and 2011 projects and all but one of our GSoC 2010 projects were delivered successfully and our students were happy, with a number of the tools created going on to become widely used within the security community
11. Students from GSoC 2009, GSoC 2010 and GSoC 2011 have gone on to become active members of the honeynet community, including proposing project ideas for GSoC 2010 and GSoC 2011 or offering to be project mentors and org administrators (so we can't be too unpleasant a bunch to get involved with!) ;-)
12. Honeypots and honeynet technology, research and tools have filtered down benefits to many areas of IT, web development, operational service management, Internet education and computer security research

GSoC is not the only way you can become involved in the with honeynet technologies and open source software - check out our current or historic series of forensic challenges. Or learn more about the practical, real world application of honeynet technology in our popular series of "Know Your Enemy" whitepapers, which now include projects and tools output from previous GSoCs students or mentors such as PicViz, Glastopf, Qebek or Conficker.

Feel free to contact us at https://public.honeynet.org/mailman/listinfo/gsoc or project@honeynet.org at any time.