During Google Summer of Code 2015, in the Honeynet Project open-source org, Valerio Costamagna and Cong Zheng (mentor) worked on ARTDroid, an easy-to-use framework for hooking virtual-method under latest Android runtime (ART).

Introduction
We propose ARTDroid, a framework which allows to analyze Android apps without modifications to both Android framework and apps. The core technology is the library injection and virtual methods hooking by vtable tampering after getting the root privilege.

After a tense few days of waiting, which is always the most stressful part of GSoC for mentoring organizations and org admins, 19:00 UTC today was the moment of truth when some lucky orgs found out that they were accepted for GSoC 2015, and other orgs sadly discovered that they would not be taking part.

After missing GSoC 2014 we were particularly tense, but the great news is that we are very pleased to announce that The Honeynet Project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for GSoC 2015. Woohoo! It is going to be another exciting summer… :-)

With winter in the northern hemisphere beginning to turn into spring, it is once again time to think about summer. And of course, for many open source organizations, that means Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

After successfully participating in GSoC between 2009 and 2013 to create or extended many honeynet technologies that have gone on to become industry standard tools, we are very happy to annouce that The Honeynet Project has applied to be a mentoring organization in GSoC 2015.

Over the past five years, The Honeynet Project has been had the pleasure of mentoring over 70 lucky bachelors, masters and PhD students from all over the world through Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Google’s ongoing programme of support for international students working on free open source software (FOSS). Together we have worked on a large number of information security tools, including some that have gone on to be the leading examples of tools in their chosen field. Overall it has been a hugely positive experience for us and our students, and has resulted in many becoming active long term members of our community. We very much hope that will continue in the future.

MalwareZ is a visualization project that is started as a YakindanEgitim (YE) project. YE is a startup that me and some collegues mentor young people on specific projects, remotely. It is announced as a local fork of Google Summer of Code, except neither mentors nor mentees are paid.

Gürcan Gerçek was the main developer for the MalwareZ project and my role was mentoring him.

MalwareZ project idea arose from the 2011 GSoC project idea. The aim was to generate 3D visualizations of malware visualizations with heatmap mesh grids. It has been a while since the project is not edited and become more usable so the idea is used instead.

To have a better visibility of this years GSoC projects we have created a blog for the students and their mentors. This blog is the place where students should post weekly updates about their progress. It is also the place where students and mentors can share their findings and experiences about and during the GSoC projects as they happen. The first updates have already started to drip in and it is getting interesting.

After a pretty hectic few weeks of student application review, setting and scoring coding challenges, and assessing proposals, mentoring organizations participating in GSoC 2013 had to confirm their student slot allocations and final short list of preferred candidates by Friday May 24th at 19:00 UTC. This is always one of the most difficult periods for us, with many tough decisions required trying to balance the best mix of students/projects/mentors into a limited number of student slots. It is always less that we would ideally like, making it impossible to keep everyone happy, and often pretty challenging. This year was no different, with a lot of late nights and last minute debate.

Having being very pleased to be accepted once again by Google as one of the lucky mentoring organization for GSoC 2013, we had eagerly awaited the student application period starting and the excitement (and occasional drama) that always brings. Once again we were not disappointed, with a steady stream of students getting in touch with us via our public mailing list or IRC channel (#gsoc-honeynet on irc.freenode.net) and exploring project ideas with us.

Google had made a number of changes to the usual process for GSoC 2013, including moving the program start date (and therefore also the student application period) backwards by about a month, and reducing the number of individual student applications to a maximum of five per student. These changes were likely to make the program more attractive to European students (who generally have later summer holidays), and also hopefully reduce the amount of last minute spam applications by encouraging more detailed proposal writing.

With less that 24 hours now remaining until the official deadline for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013 student applications (19:00 UTC Friday May 3rd 2013), this is our final call for interested and eligible GSoC students. If you are interested or intend to get involved, please apply now.

For anyone new to the GSoC program, or anyone who has already talked to us on IRC (#gsoc-honeynet on irc.freenode.net) or on our public GSoC mailing list, please remember that you must still submit your student application the Google’s official GSoC 2013 form in Melange for it to be official.

After a tense few days for all of the organizations who applied, The Honeynet Project is delighted to announce that it has once again been selected as one the participating mentoring organizations in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013. This is great news and should make for another very exciting summer for many students, mentors and team members, so many thanks to Google’s and their Open Source Projects Office for their continued support of both us and free open source software (FLOSS) in general. We all really appreciate the support :-)