GSoC 2016 Student Selection Officially Announced

At the end of February we were very happy to announce that The Honeynet Project had once again been selected to be a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016.

Since then, there as been a flurry of activity: GSoC 2016 student applications opened on March 14th at 19:00 UTC and closed on March 25th at 19:00 UTC. We received 54 student project applications, and our 24 mentors and org admins were hard at work in the following weeks assessing them and the students who applied. This is always the busiest part of GSoC for us, and with some significant changes to the GSoC program and supporting systems we suspected it might be one of the busiest times ever. But in fact, this year actually went pretty smoothly for us. We actually faced fewer difficult selection decisions than normal, which was a bit of a surprise.

After a few tense days of waiting, Google officially announced the full list of accepted students and the student celebrations/commiserations could begin. For GSoC 2016, there 7,543 total student applications to 178 mentoring organizations from 5,107 students. 1,206 students accepted overall, with The Honeynet Project gaining 12 student project slots (so about 1% of the total successful student allocation). This was a great result for us :-)

Our GSoC 2016 students, mentors and projects will be (sorted alphabetically by project name):

Project: Cuckoo Sandbox ML
Student: Kacper (Kacper Blazej Sokol, PL)
Mentors: Hugo Gascon, Jurriaan Bremer

Project: DRAKVUF on ARM
Student: Sergej Proskurin (DE)
Mentors: Tamas Lengyel, Steven Mares, George Webster

Project: Droidbot improvements
Student: lynnlyc (Yuanchun Li, CN)
Mentors: Hugo Gonzalez, Hanno Lemoine
 
Project: Integrate Droidbot into Cuckoo Sandbox
Student:  Tin Duong (VN)
Mentors: Jurriaan Bremer, Hugo Gonzalez

Project:  Centralized service configuration for Holmes

Student: Ma-Shell (Marcel Schum, DE)
Mentors: Zachary Hanif, George Webster

Project: Web Interface/API for Holmes
Student: cvp (Christian von Pentz, DE)
Mentors: Zachary Hanif, George Webster

Project: MITMProxy
Student: dufferZafar (IN)
Mentors: Thomas Kriechbaumer, Maximilian Hils

Project: MITMProxy
Student: Jason Hao (CN)
Mentors: Aldo Cortesi, Maximilian Hils

Project: MITMProxy
Student: cle1000 (Clemence Brunner, AT)
Mentors: Aldo Cortesi, Maximilian Hils

Project: Rumāl
Student: Dennis Parchkov (migrated from YAPDNS)
Mentors: Pietro Delsante, Fedele Mantuano, Tarun Kumar, Andrea De Pasquale

Project: SNARE/TANNER
Student: Afeena (Evgeniya Tokarchuk, RU)
Mentors: Lukas Rist, Andrea De Pasquale

Project: YAPDNS
Student: system64 (Akshay Aurora, IN)
Mentors: Pietro Delsante, Fedele Mantuano, Andrea De Pasquale

The next step for everyone is the Community Bonding Period, which runs until May 23rd, until student coding officially begins. During this time mentors will be getting to know their students, establishing good communications and working practices, fleshing out more detaile about the project and planning their milestones and deliverables. Org admins will be providing more information to our selected students about mailing lists, IRC/slack, source code management, regular status tracking, assessments, etc.

We will also be updating our public website with more content about each student project, as well as holding face to face GSoC 2016 planning sessions at our upcoming annual workshop in San Antonio, Texas in a couple of weeks time. This event will be attended by org admins, mentors and past successful GSoC students, so hopefully this good timing will get us off to the perfect start to summer.

Thanks once again to Google for giving us the opportunity to support student open source development, and to everyone involved so far in making this happen. We are looking forwards to another fun and productive summer of coding together.