GSoC2012 Ideas

Information for Students
The ideas below were contributed by OWASP project leaders and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the corresponding project leaders and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at. Being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

Adding a Proposal
Project:

Brief explanation:

Expected results:

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Mentor:

Ideas How to find ideas? Obvious sources of projects are the OWASP project wiki, bugs database, and project mailing lists.

Generic Sample Proposal
Accepted for GSoC 2011

Brief explanation:

KDE has developed a number of very interesting and powerful technologies, libraries and components but there is no easy way to show them to other people.

Expected results:

Something like Qt Demo but with KDE technologies.

Knowledge prerequisite:

C++ is the main language of KDE, therefore the demo should be in C++. The more you know about C++, Qt, KDE and scripting (for Kross and KDE bindings demos), the better. This idea encompasses so much different stuff the student is not expected to know everything before he starts coding (but will certainly know a lot when he's done!).

Skill level: medium

Mentor: Pau Garcia i Quiles as general mentor and someone to ask for directions. Specific help for each technology will probably require help from its developers.

ZAP Proxy
The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications.

It is designed to be used by people with a wide range of security experience and as such is ideal for developers and functional testers who are new to penetration testing.

ZAP provides automated scanners as well as a set of tools that allow you to find security vulnerabilities manually.

P001 - Compare crawling sessions for authentication issues
Project: OWASP ZAP Proxy

Brief explanation: Develop a ZAP session crawler to be able to compare two crawling sessions of two logged in users and see what URLs or Actions could be performed from the other session.

Expected results:

Example:

- Login as User A -> Crawl GUI and save as "user A crawl"

- Login as User B -> Crawl GUI and save as "user B crawl"

- Have ZAP be able to login as User B and then check how much of the "user A crawl" is accessible (i.e. list accessible URLs)

- Have ZAP be able to login as User A and then check how much of the "user B crawl" is accessible (i.e. list of accessible URLs)

Knowledge Prerequisite: TBD

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader

P002 - Configurable actions
Project: OWASP ZAP Proxy

Brief explanation: Introduce a standard component for defining matching against requests and responses. This could be reused for the history filter, similar filters on other tabs (eg sites), break points, passive scan rules, excludes, etc etc It would need to be able to persist the rules to the db. I'd also like to be able to define complex rules, essentially replacing and extending the existing filter capability, but allowing users to define their own rules. That would include being able to replace any text, replace methods, potentially even custom functionality defined by a beanshell script. The challenge will be to make it as usable as possible while still providing a wide range of functionality.

Expected results:

I see this component providing a set of highly configurable 'actions' which the user would see up via a wizard. So they would initially define when the action applies, based on things like regex matching on request elements. And they should be able to define multiple criteria with ANDs and ORs. Then they would define the actions, which could include: They would then be able to switch the actions on and off from the full list of defined actions using checkboxes
 * Changing the request (adding, removing or replacing strings)
 * Raising alerts
 * Breaking (to replace existing break points)
 * Running custom scripts (which could do pretty much anything)

Knowledge Prerequisite: TBD

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader

P003 - Extend Web API to cover all of the ZAP functionality
Project: OWASP ZAP Proxy

Brief explanation: Extend Web API to cover all of the ZAP functionality

Expected results: Comprehensive Web API that will cover all of the ZAP Proxy functionality.

Knowledge Prerequisite: TBD

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader

P004 - Closer integration with OWASP AJAX
Project: OWASP ZAP Proxy

Brief explanation: TBD

Expected results: TBD

Knowledge Prerequisite: TBD

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader