Introducing the 2015 Nmap/Google Summer of Code Team!

[Fyodor <fyodor () nmap org>]

Hello everyone.  Google has agreed to sponsor five amazing students to
spend this summer enhancing the Nmap Security Scanner and I'm proud to
introduce our 2015 team:

*Andrew Farabee* will be working to refactor parts of the Nmap codebase in
ways which enable more functionality while also improving performance and
hopefully easing code maintenance too!  His first task involves adding a
SOCKS proxy name resolution feature to enable scanning of Tor hidden
services. Then he will update our connect() scanning engine (-sT) to use
our nsock library of socket routines. This should improve performance by
allowing the use of better native APIs such as epoll or kqueue as well as
allowing for port scanning through chains of proxies. Andrew is pursuing a
bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of California,
Irvine. He will be mentored by Jacek Wielemborek, who has worked on related
Nmap code and was previously himself an Nmap GSoC student (twice).

*Gioacchino Mazzurco* will be our "feature creeper", working on
enhancements throughout the Nmap codebase as needed. We expect performance
improvements to be the largest portion of his efforts this summer. Gio is
about to graduate with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Pisa
University in Italy and then he's spending the summer in Barcelona, Spain.
He'll be mentored by Dan Miller, who had incredible success mentoring
feature creeper Jay Bosamiya last year.

*Gyanendra Mishra* will spend the summer writing NSE scripts, with an
emphasis on those which interact with web sites and servers. Our Nmap
Scripting Engine has already grown to 491 scripts (http://nmap.org/nsedoc/)
and we're excited to see what great new ones Gyani comes up with!  He is
pursuing a bachelor's degree in computer science at Birla Institute of
Technology and Science in Pilani, India.  Gyani will also be mentored by
Dan Miller, who is the only one of us brave enough to mentor multiple
students this year.

*Jiayi Ye* will also be developing NSE scripts this summer, but her focus
is more on vulnerability detection and network discovery. In fact, she
already wrote and submitted her first script!  It uses Tor's network
consensus system to determine whether a target is a Tor node. Jiayi is
pursuing a master's degree in Computer Science at Peking University in
China. She will be mentored by Paulino Calderon Pale, a former Nmap GSoC
student who has written dozens of NSE scripts and just published a book on
the Mastering the Nmap Scripting Engine (
https://www.packtpub.com/networking-and-servers/mastering-nmap-scripting-engine
).

*Yang Luo* is a previous Nmap GSoC student returning to work on improving
the WinPcap library that Nmap uses for packet capture on Windows.  By
moving from the deprecated Windows NDIS5 API to the newer and superior
Windows Filtering Platform, Yang will improve Nmap support and performance
for all Windows users.  We hope to address several other WinPcap
limitations at the same time.  Yang (like Jiayi) is a grad student at
Peking University in China. He's seeing a Ph.D. in software engineering,
with research interests in network security, cloud security and Android
security.

This is the Nmap Project's 11th year participating in the Google Summer of
Code. If you enjoy the Zenmap GUI, Ncat, Ndiff, Nping, Ncrack, or the Nmap
Scripting Engine, you're using features developed in a large part by
previous Summer of Code students.  And with a team like this, we can't help
but expect more great things!  Full-time coding starts May 25, but we have
already started project brainstorming and planning.  Some participants may
use this community bonding period to get an early start on coding, while
others will focus on testing Nmap and reading the code and documentation.

Please join us in welcoming this new team of Nmap SoC students!  Most of
the development will be done on the Nmap dev list (
http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/), where everybody is encouraged to
participate in coding, suggesting ideas, testing, etc.

We had 49 applications this year and most were excellent.  I regret that we
could only accept 10% of them, but I'd like to thank everyone who applied!
Please try again next year, if you can. We've had several cases in the past
where we couldn't find room for someone one year, but were able to accept
them the next. I'd also like to offer big thanks to Google for putting
another six million dollars (over all projects) into open source
development this summer!

Cheers,
Fyodor
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