The Honeynet Project

While the quantity of submissions for FC10 was lower than usual - we had expected this because of the amount of work required to submit plus being over the Christmas break - the quality of the solutions was really inspiring.

Of course the hardest part was deciding the winners, and as expected the traditional scoring method was not ideal for this type of challenge because the challenge was about creating and developing ideas, rather than just answering a number of dry questions. Quite a few people people used the challenge not so much to win a prize, but to have fun, develop an idea they've had, practice on some real datasets, learn, and teach. This was exactly the spirit we'd hoped for, so thanks to everyone for putting in a big effort.

The Winners and their solutions:
Fabian Fischer - solution

Chris Horsley - solution

Fraser Scott - solution

Dan Gleebits - solution

Johnathan Tracz - solution

The standout theme in the submissions for me was the use of interactive and flexible tools to analyse the data. As we move further into the big data world, its going to be imperative to get inside the data interactively to understand it. Some of the solutions focused on developing brand new applications/frameworks to interactively data sets - Check out the submissions from Fabian and Chris as really good examples of this. While Fraser put forward the idea of rendering images in 3D - which is not that far-out an idea actually, why not?!.

We hope that this challenge was enjoyable for those who participated, and for those downloading the submissions for inspiration. These challenges have a long legacy, we see people downloading, attempting and referencing these challenges and the solutions for education purposes years afterwards, so they are an important program at the Honeynet Project.

It would be great to see solutions to future forensic challenges use visualization, not only to analyse and detect trends, but also to describe the problem space to the layperson. With that said - the next Forensic challenge, FC11 should be released shortly - so stay tuned.

And lastly, if anyone wants to develop their ideas further, a good way (i.e. get paid if you are accepted!) is to get involved in our upcoming Google Summer of Code program GSOC12

read more

Folks, Google has just announced the accepted projects on the GSoc website. We had an excellent line up of students and proposals this year and were able to accept 12 projects! Thanks for all the students who have applied this year and congratulations to all accepted!

Christian

With GSoC 2011 student applications having been open for the past week, we've been having a number of interesting discussions with potential students on both #gsoc2011-honeynet on irc.freenode.net and on our public GSoC mailing list and this summer is already looking to have many exciting project ideas.

read more

Folks, challenge 7 - forensic analysis of a compromised server - put up by Hugo Gonzalez from the Mexico Chapter and Guillaume Arcas from the French Chapter is in full swing. Submissions are due by March 31st, so if you want to participate, you have 5 days left. We award little prizes for the top three submissions! Hope to see your submission.

Christian

Our annual workshop in Paris got off to the perfect start this weekend when Google went live with the new look GSoC 2011 Melange site and announced which lucky organizations had been accepted as mentoring orgs for GSoC 2011.

read more

Folks, we had a great day at the first-ever public Honeynet Project Security Workshop yesterday with many excellent presentations by our members from around the globe. The presentations ranged from deep technical dives around shellcode detection and mobile malware reverse engineering to views on social dynamics of attackers and ethics of computer security research.

Further, we hosted a small capture-the-flag/forensic challenge competition, which received plentiful participation - especially with the younger crowd.

We hope that everybody enjoyed the workshop. If you were not able to make it to the workshop this year, we have attached the slides to this blog post. Hope to see you again in 2012.

Christian Seifert
CEO, The Honeynet Project

read more

23:00 UTC Friday March 11th was the first deadline for Google Summer of Code 2011, and the cut off point for organizations interesting in participating to complete their org application.

read more

Has it really been another year already? Having really enjoyed our experience as a successful mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2009 and Google Summer of Code 2010, The Honeynet Project is very pleased to announce that we will once again be applying to be accepted this year as a potential mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011 (note the changed URL for GSoC 2011).

read more