I managed to get a Google Summer of Code stipend this year working with the nmap crew. WIth regards to the people that I’m working with: WOW, some of them are pretty well known in their respective communities.
Introducing the 2008 Nmap/Google Summer of Code Team
The Nmap Project is pleased to announce that Google has agreed to
sponsor seven student developers to spend their Summer enhancing the
Nmap Security Scanner. If you enjoy the new Zenmap GUI, 2nd
generation OS detection system, or the Nmap Scripting Engine, then you
are using features developed in a large part by previous Summer of
Code students. While the last three years have been terrific
successes, as described at
http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2007/q4/0024.html , we hope accomplish
even more this year. So we’re delighted to introduce the 2008 team:
Kemal Akman has already made a name for himself in the security world
under his handle Mixter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixter). His
experience writing numerous security tools and exploits makes him a
perfect choice to create Ncat and Nping, new interpretations of the
venerable netcat and hping2 utilities. Our versions will utilize
Nmap’s efficient networking libraries, be actively maintained, and
include all the features we have long wished were in the originals.
Much of the work on Ncat has already been completed by previous SoC
student Chris Gibson. For more details on our plans, see the project
requirements document at http://nmap.org/SoC/Ncat.html . Mixter is
finishing his 2nd year studying Bioinformatics at Ludwig-Maxmillians
University in Munich, Germany. He will be mentored by Nmap author
Fyodor.
Patrick Donnelly is a well-known expert in the Lua community, and also
has substantial experience with C and C++. So he is a perfect choice
to improve the Nmap Scripting Engine [http://nmap.org/book/nse.html]
infrastructure. Some ideas include adding a script documentation
system based on LuaDoc and improving the efficiency of the system.
Patrick is finishing his 3rd year as a Computer Engineering student at
the University of New Mexico in the USA. His project mentor is
Fyodor.
Kris Katterjohn has long been one of the most prolific Nmap
developers. He has authored hundreds of useful patches, and his name
appears in the Nmap changelog 82 times. He was a successful Nmap SoC
student last summer, and we’re delighted to have him back again. As a
feature creeper, Kris will handle a wide variety of tasks, from fixing
bugs to adding new features. Kris is finishing his 2nd year studying
Computer Science at Northwest Mississippi Community College in the
USA. He will be mentored by Fyodor.
Vladimir Mitrovic plans to spend the summer improving the Zenmap GUI.
In addition to improving the interface, Vladimir is interested in
adding network topology mapping to the system. He has already written
code for this, and posted ideas at
http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2008/q1/0409.html . Vladimir
successfully completed SoC last year with the OpenMRS project. When
we asked his previous mentor for a reference letter, it started with
“Vladimir is a star” and ended with “If you work with Vladimir, you
won’t be disappointed.” He is finishing his fifth year studying
Computer Science at the University of Belgrade in Serbia. Vladimir
will be mentored by David Fifield, who was himself an Nmap SoC student
last year.
Jurand Nogiec will also be working on features and enhancements for
Zenmap. Our goal is to make Zenmap so powerful in browsing and
analyzing results that even Nmap experts will prefer it to the
command-line for some scans. Of course the traditional command-line
version isn’t going away! Jurand is finishing his second year
studying Computer Science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in the USA. He will be mentored by David Fifield.
Michael Pattrick will be a feature creeper working on a wide variety
of important Nmap tasks. One of tasks will be improving the Nmap OS
fingerprint integration system as described at
http://bamsoftware.com/wiki/Nmap/OSIntegratorAssistantRequirements, as
he has already developed some great ideas for doing so. Michael is
completing his 2nd year studying IT Security at the University of
Ontario IT in Canada. His mentor is David Fifield.
Philip Pickering plans to focus on the Nmap Scripting Engine, with an
emphasis on writing valuable scripts and libraries. He will also be
doing some infrastructure work, such as enhancing the NSE debugger so
it can be integrated with Nmap. Philip is completing his 2nd year
studying Software & Information Engineering at the Vienna University
of Technology in Austria. His mentor will be Diman Todorov, who
helped create the Nmap Scripting Engine as a Nmap SoC student in 2006.
In addition to these core Nmap projects, 5 students were sponsored to
work on the UMIT Nmap GUI. UMIT was created by SoC student Adriano
Marques in 2005 and 2006 and forms the basis of Zenmap which is now
included with our Nmap packages and integrated into our repository.
However, Adriano has developed his own design goals for Umit, and is
carrying it forward as a separate project. We wish him the best in
this endeavor and are excited to see what the Umit team comes up with.
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 invited 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 2008!
-Fyodor
