Founded in 1999, The Honeynet Project is an international, non-profit (501c3) research organization dedicated to improving the security of the Internet at no cost to the public.
Our achievements are based on the principles of open source and volunteer efforts, with all software or papers created being licensed as open source and made freely available to the community.
We help coordinate the development, deployment, advancement and research findings of honeypot and anti-malware related technologies. With over 45 international chapters, 350 members and 30 open source research projects around around the world, we are a mature, highly diverse and international organization.
Simply put, our goal is to make a difference. We accomplish this via:
Awareness - We raise awareness of the threats and vulnerabilities that exist in the Internet today. Many individuals & organizations do not realize they are a target, nor understand who is attacking them, how, or why. We provide this information, so people can better understand that they are a target, and understand the basic measures they can take to mitigate these threats. This is provided through our Know Your Enemy series of papers.
Tools - For organizations interested in continuing their own research about cyber threats, we provide the tools and techniques we have developed. All tools are specifically licensed open source. Organizations all over the world use our tools.
Information - In addition to raising awareness, we provide details to better secure assets. Historically, information about attackers has been limited to the tools they use. We provide critical additional information, such as their motives in attacking, how they communicate, when they attack systems and their actions after compromising a system. We provide this service through our Know Your Enemy whitepapers and our periodic Scan of the Month challenges.
The Honeynet Project uses GSoC as a incubator for new R&D projects, and to recruit active new members.
- Twitter: This year we have a wide range of project ideas and are also interested in hearing your ideas too. Our projects cover a wide range of programming languages and technologies. Project idea difficulty can range from fairly challenging, low level systems type projects that are likely to appeal to pretty confident programmers, through interesting data analysis, to data presentation projects building more effective user interfaces. We are always interested in discussing a student's own project ideas, and actively aim to mentor high quality student ideas too. If you are unsure, we can help you form your ideas during the student proposal submission period. If you want to find out more, take a look at our project ideas web page, subscribe to our blog and public GSoC questions mailing list.Then come and say hello on the #gsoc-honeynet IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (you can connect via webchat if you are behind a firewall or don't have a command line client too). There you should find a mix of organizational admins, project mentors, past successful GSoC students, general Honeynet Project members and prospective students, so please don’t be nervous - feel free to ask questions and we will always try and get back to you (although we may be idle for an hour or two when we sleep :) ). If you prefer email, check out the link to our mailing list or use [email protected]. We are looking forwards to hearing from you and hopefully collaborating on something awesome together this summer.