Openwall's primary focus is in development of information security related free software, information security research, publications, and community activities aimed at making existing free software safer to use.

A major one of our software projects is Openwall GNU/*/Linux (or simply Owl), a security-hardened Linux distro for servers, currently at (and beyond) version 3.0. We have a nearly perfect userland in terms of privilege reduction and privilege separation of/in individual programs/services. Specifically, Owl 3.0 is the very first Linux distro to have no SUID programs in the default install (yet be usable). Under GSoC, we'd like to proceed with further work on Owl, adding new functionality, making updates to existing functionality, and improving the system security even further (specifically, of the Linux kernel).

Another sub-project is John the Ripper, a popular Open Source and cross-platform password cracker (password security auditing tool). Its homepage has exceeded 16 million hits. Many JtR tasks are being considered for GSoC, including making JtR work "against" more kinds of "targets", optimizations, GPU support, and GUI.

Finally, we have many smaller and/or new project ideas. These include work on an extremely fast and lightweight web-based interface to mailing list archives (in C), ..., and even your own creative and relevant idea (you name it!) Please check out our ideas page for the rationale behind these projects and (a bit) more detail, then approach us with questions if interested.