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.

Website: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Zed_Attack_Proxy_Project

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/zaproxy-develop

Project 001 - Compare crawling sessions for authentication issues
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:

ZAP will be able to recognise when requests are associated with different sessions.

ZAP should allow the user to view the crawled URLs for each session independantly, and show which URLs are unique to each session.

It should also be able to check if any of the 'unique' pages can in fact be accessed by the other session.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

ZAP is written in Java, so a good knowledge of this language is recommended, as is knowledge of HTML. Some knowledge of crawlers and/or aplication security would be useful, but not essential.

Mentors: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader | Skyler Onken - OWASP ZAP Developer

Project 002 - Dynamically Configurable actions
Brief explanation:

ZAP provides various mechanisms which allow HTTP requests and responses to be changed dynamically. So (for example) a string in an HTTP request can automatically be changed to another string.

It also supports a scripting interface, which is very powerful but at the moment difficult to use.

This project would introduce something inbetween thess 2 options - a powerful way of defining (potentially) complex rules using a wizard based interface.

The challenge will be to make it as usable as possible while still providing a wide range of functionality.

Expected results:

This component would provide 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:

ZAP is written in Java, so a good knowledge of this language is recommended, as is knowledge of HTML. Some knowledge of application security would be useful, but not essential.

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader | Skyler Onken - OWASP ZAP Developer

Project 003 - Extend Web API to cover all of the ZAP functionality
Brief explanation:

ZAP provides a REST based API which can be used to control core aspects of the functionality provided by ZAP.

This project would extend that API to cover all/most of the ZAP functionality.

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

Knowledge Prerequisite:

ZAP is written in Java, so a good knowledge of this language is recommended, as is knowledge of HTML. Some knowledge of application security would be useful, but not essential.

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader | Skyler Onken - OWASP ZAP Developer

Project 004 - Closer integration with OWASP AJAX
Brief explanation:

ZAP provides a basic spider that can be used to explore an application, however it is very limited, especially when used with AJAX based applications.

The OWASP AJAX crawling tool (https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_AJAX_Crawling_Tool) is specifically designed to crawl AJAX applications and can already use ZAP as a proxy.

This project would develop a ZAP plugin which integrates ZAP with the OWASP AJAX crawling Tool.

Expected results:

A new ZAP plugin would be produced which allows ZAP to crawl AJAX applications using the OWASP AJAX crawling tool.

The plugin would allow the 2 tools to be tightly integrated, while still allowing them to work completely independently.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Both ZAP and the AJAX tool are written in Java, so a good knowledge of this language is recommended, as is knowledge of HTML. Some knowledge of crawlers and/or aplication security would be useful, but not essential.

Mentor: Simon Bennetts - OWASP ZAP Project Leader | Skyler Onken - OWASP AJAX Tool Project Leader