The Honeynet Project

Please note that GSoC 2011 has now successfully completed. This content is being retained for reference only.

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 have once again applied to be accepted this year as a potential mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011 (note the changed URL for the official GSoC 2011 site).

The first GSoC 2011 deadline was Friday March 11th, which was the deadline for interested organizations to submit their org application. Although we need to wait until March 18th for Google to officially announce which organizations will be selected to participate, our initial list of GSoC 2011 project ideas is now available. We also have some additional project ideas that we are still reviewing internally and will add to the list once deliverables and mentor availability is confirmed.

As in previous years, this list of proposed project ideas is not definitive, and we are also open to receiving and mentoring interesting and novel project ideas from students too. So if there is a research topic you are interested in working on this summer, please get in touch. If you want to get an idea of the kind of projects ideas we proposed and the accepted projects we ran during GSoC 2009 and GSoC 2010, you can view these here:

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

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.

While we wait for Google announce which organizations will be selected to participate in GSoC 2011 (fingers crossed for March 18!), if you have any questions, please drop by in our new #gsoc2011-honeynet IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and say "hi" (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).

We've also started a new public mailing list for interested prospective students to get in touch - 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 2011.

Organisational Administrators

Our GSoC 2011 organisational administrators are:

So with East Coast/West Coast US, Europe, Asia and Australia covered we can hopefully offer students and mentors round the clock support 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 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 and GSoC 2010 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 (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 such as PicViz or Conficker.

Feel free to contact us at project@honeynet.org at any time.