PacketFence's Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

April 3, 2012

Work all summer long on a hard-core Network Security project written in Perl!

Students: You can make 5000 $USD contributing to our open source project and learn a lot along the way!

What is PacketFence?

PacketFence is a Free and Open Source network access control (NAC) system. Boasting an impressive feature set including a captive-portal for registration and remediation, guest management, centralized wired and wireless management, 802.1X support, layer-2 and 3 isolation of problematic devices, integration with the Snort IDS, Nessus or OpenVAS vulnerability scanners; PacketFence can be used to effectively secure networks.

Mainly developed in Perl with some PHP, Web (HTML/CSS/Javascript) and SQL, PacketFence leverages components from famous open source projects like Snort, Apache’s HTTPD, Net-SNMP, FreeRADIUS, mod_perl, MySQL, DHCPd, Bind (named), OpenVAS and more.

Why choose PacketFence? Because the project is awesome!

But also because we are doing our development on modern collaboration tools like git/github and using a pragmatic development strategy focused on delivering value.

Iterative code reviews and mentor availability is guaranteed. We have delivered several major releases over the year and promise that your code will not languish in a 3rd party repository for years before being included. Your code might even be released during the summer!

Lastly, you will be working on enterprise-level network access control technologies exactly as if you are part of the team! Imagine your resume after the summer!

Here’s a quick overview of our Ideas:

• Create a multi-platform agent that would perform client-side security checks
• Android-based application for Wireless security auto-configuration
• Web administration interface rewrite
• Initial configuration Web-based instead of through command line
• nmap integration as a scanning engine
• IF-MAP integration
• Active - Active clustering support
• Experiments in data visualization
• New authentication schemes
• Stealth mode - PacketFence in gather-only operation (just added!)
• Your own idea!

Further information:

• Ideas page and our GSoC info
• Application (Hurry up! Application ends: April 06 at 19:00 UTC)
• PacketFence homepage
• Source code (github)

Get in touch with us now!

• irc://irc.freenode.net/packetfence
• @packetfence on twitter
• obilodeau@inverse.ca

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