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.

For the past ten years everything we have done and continue to do is based on the principles of opensource and volunteer efforts. Our bylaws specifically state any software or papers developed and published by the organization must be licensed as open source and made freely available to the community.

Our goal is to help coordinate the development, deployment, advancement and research findings of honeypot related technologies. With over thirty chapters, one hundred members and twenty opensource research projects around around the world, we are a highly diverse and international organization.

Simply put, our goal is to make a difference. We accomplish this goal in the following three ways:

Awareness We raise awareness of the threats and vulnerabilities that exist in the Internet today. Many individuals and 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 they are a target, and understand the basic measures they can take to mitigate these threats. This information is provided through our Know Your Enemy series of papers.

Information For those who are already aware and concerned, we provide details to better secure and defend your resources. 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 Scan of the Month challenges.

Tools For organizations interested in continuing their own research about cyber threats, we provide the tools and techniques we have developed. We provide these through our Tools Site.

Learn more at http://www.honeynet.org.

Google Summer of Code 2012

This year in Google Summer of Code we have a wide range of project ideas and we are also interested in your ideas that advance the community knowledge into new areas. Our projects and skill sets cover a wide range of programming languages (C, C++, python, PHP, perl, java, javascript, Processing, etc), database/SQL, IP networking, kernel and device driver development, UI and web interface development, databases, IDS, data visualization, etc. Project idea difficulty can range from fairly challenging, low level root kit / kernel / hypervizor modification type projects that are likely to appeal to pretty confident programmers, through to less code intensive but equally interesting data analysis and presentation projects building effective user interfaces.

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 come and say hello on the #gsoc2012-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 should be a mix of organisational admins, project mentors, past successful GSoC students, general Honeynet Project members and prospective students, so feel free to ask questions and we will always try and get back to you. If you are new to IRC, try reading an online primer but don't be worried, we'll be happy to help you get up to speed.

Our code repository can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2012-honeynet-project/