Introducing the 2010 Nmap/Google Summer of Code Team

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

Hello everyone.  The Nmap Project is pleased to announce that Google
has sponsored eight student developers to spend this summer enhancing
the Nmap Security Scanner and related projects! We received so many
great proposals that they took weeks to review, but we're quite happy
with the final selections.

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. This will be our sixth year in the
program, and we have an ambitious agenda. Full time coding starts May
24, though we've 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.

I'm delighted to introduce this 2010 team:

*Alexandru Totolici* will be taking Nmap into the cloud! He's creating
 a hosted Nmap system for scanning your own machines over the Internet
 to see what is exposed. Regular emails or instant alerts can be sent
 with change notifications. Hosting the software on-site will allow
 you to scan your internal networks too.  Alex is about to receive a
 Computer Science bachelor's degree from the University of British
 Columbia in Canada, and will be returning there for a master's
 program next year. He will be mentored by Fyodor.

*Djalal Harouni* will be working on the Nmap Scripting Engine--both
 writing scripts and working on the infrastructure itself. Despite
 being new to Lua, he has already had a patch improving the NSE RPC
 library incorporated into Nmap.  He also knows how to code securely,
 as demonstrated by his history of finding vulnerabilities in other
 projects (e.g. http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2009/Jul/196). Djalal is
 studying Computer Science at Mentouri University in Constantine,
 Algeria.  He will be mentored by Patrick Donnelly, who was himself a
 successful Nmap SoC student in '08 and '09.

*Dražen Popović* will also be working on NSE scripts.  He has many
 great ideas, as he has previously done scripting work for the OpenVAS
 security scanner project. He is particularly interested in writing
 more MSRPC-related scripts to complement Nmap's already excellent
 MSRPC libraries. Dražen is in his fourth year studying Computer
 Science at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.  He will be mentored
 by David Fifield.

*Ithilgore* developed Ncrack (http://nmap.org/ncrack/) as a SoC
 student last year, and he is coming back to further refine this high
 speed brute force authentication cracking tool!  The current alpha
 release is already quite useful, but Ithilgore will be adding more
 cracking modules, improving performance, fixing bugs, cleaning up the
 code, and more! He is currently studying Computer Engineering and
 Computer Science at the University of Patras in Greece. He will be
 working with Fyodor again this year.

*Kirubakaran Sampath* will be working on the Zenmap GUI, with a
 particular emphasis on adding better Nmap Scripting Engine
 support. We now have more than 125 scripts, and Zenmap should be able
 to list and describe them all and help users select the appropriate
 scripts and arguments. Kirubakaran is pursuing a bachelor's degree in
 computer science and engineering at the College of Engineering,
 Guindy in India. He will be mentored by David.

*Luis MartinGarcia* is returning to further develop the Nping program
 (http://nmap.org/nping/) that he started as a SoC student last
 year. Nping is an open source tool for network packet generation,
 response analysis and response time measurement. In the first phase
 of this project, Luis will work with David to better integrate Nping
 with Nmap's library infrastructure and clean up the code. Then he
 will work with Fyodor on new features, including the novel echo mode
 we're all excited about.  Luis is a computer engineering student at
 Carlos III University in Spain.

In addition to these six students for Nmap proper, we have agreed to
accept two students to work on UMIT, which started as an Nmap SoC
project and formed the basis of Zenmap.  UMIT has also continued as an
independent project, for which Adriano Marques will be mentoring Diogo
Pinheiro and Kosma Moczek. Diego plans to integrate several disparate
UMIT projects into one, while Kosma will improve the UMPA packet
manipulation library.

Please join us in welcoming this new team of Nmap SoC students! Most
of the development will be done on the nmap-dev list, where everybody
is encouraged to participate in coding, suggesting ideas, testing,
etc. With a team like this, we can't help but expect great things for
the summer of 2010!

I'd also like to offer big thanks to Google for putting another 5
million dollars (over all projects) into open source development this
summer!  You can read about all the other organizations and their
accepted students at
http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2010.

Cheers,
Fyodor
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