The Honeynet Project

Having really enjoyed our experience as a successful mentoring organisation in Google Summer of Code 2009, The Honeynet Project is once again very pleased to be applying this year as a potential mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code 2010. Organisation applications are due in to Google by 23:00 UTC on the 12th of March, so expect this GSoC 2010 section of our website to be regularly updated over the coming days.

If you are a potential student, we appreciate your enthusiasm, but please bear with us and hold off asking to make an application until we find out if we have actually been accepted for GSoC 2010! ;-) However, potential GSoC students can view our list of proposed GSoC 2010 project ideas here or review our previous list of GSoC 2009 project ideas here, to find inspiration for potential project topics. Students are also free to propose their own projects ideas, as many did last year (with a number of these projects being accepted and completed), so please don't feel you need to be constrained by the ideas we initially propose - we will always try and find a suitable mentor for any interesting project proposal you submit.

If you want to learn more about what worked well for successful applicants last year, you can view the list of project applications that were accepted for official GSoC 2009 allocated project slots here (we had 9 Google funded and 3 Honeynet Project funded projects, selected from 55 applications). To find out more about our successful GSoC 2009 projects and to hear what our students and mentors thought about working with the Honeynet Project and GSoC, we have a summary report about the projects delivered during GSoC 2009, or you can find out more details from reading our students and mentors thoughts in their various archived blog posts. Lastly, if you are unfamiliar with Google Summer of Code, you can learn more at the GSoC Website.

Please note - you don't have to wait until official student applications begin before you start getting involved with honeynet technologies and open source software - check out our current or historic series of forensic challenges or join #gsoc-honeynet on irc.freenode.net and say hello. 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 such as PicViz or Conficker.

Why get involved with the Honeynet Project and GSoC 2010?

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 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 have gone on to become active members of the honeynet community, including proposing project ideas for GSoC 2010 or offering to be project mentors (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

Organisational Administrators

Our GSoC 2010 organisational administrators are: