GSOC 2015 Ideas

This is the CAcert Google Summer of Code page for 2015.

CAcert was not chosen for this years event.

To learn more about this year's event, see the Google Summer of Code 2015 page.

If you are interested in participating in the 2015 GSOC as a student and want to do something related to CAcert, please feel free to contact our GSoC administrator Benny Baumann (benbe at cacert dot org).

Table of Contents

Timeline

The timeline for GSoC for 2015 has now been posted here.

Ideas

After over 10 years of running and maintaining CAcert's existing software the software team decided to rewrite the software as maintaining the grown source code became a tough challenge.

In the course of the rewriting of the software the following two projects have been proposed for the Google Summer of Code 2015.

Rewrite OpenPGP functionality

Project Desription

Integrate functionality to accept, verify and store members' OpenPGP key for signing with CAcert's PGP key into our new software (Gigi).

Then enable the signing system (Cassiopeia) to verify and sign the members key.

Expected results

proof of concept to final version

It's Good To Know

Difficulty level

medium to advanced

Proposed Project Mentor: Benny Baumann


Multi Factor Authenticaction and Authorisation for the new software (Gigi)

Project Desription

Allow members to configure different Authentication mechanisms for their account in our new software (Gigi).

A member should be free to choose to enable/disable password authentication, token based authentication, authentication with client certificate and other means at will.

Therefore the current permission model needs to be extended to enable different permissions based on the authentication mechanism used for a session. This may include having a client certificate for administrative tasks, having an OTP token to issue new personal certificates, usage of mail tokens when managing the own account without a client certificate, or other options the user may wish for.

Expected results

Proof of Concept (PoC) to prototype

It's Good To Know

Difficulty level

medium to expert

Proposed Project Mentor: Felix Dörre


UI Improvements

Project Description

Implementation of various visual improvements to assist the user with validation of inputs, lead through various processes (input pre-validation, step-by-step instructions)

Expected results

Prototype to final version

It's Good To Know

Difficulty level

Beginner to Medium

Proposed Project Mentor: Benny Baumann, Felix Dörre


Add additional checks to weak key check for ECDSA keys

Project Description

This project aims to implement additional checks to our weak key check in order to allow auditing of ECDSA keys when signing certificates.

Expected results

Final version that can be deployed on production system

It's Good To Know

Difficulty level

medium

Proposed Project Mentor: Benny Baumann

Contact: Benny Baumann

Tips for students

Our mentors:

Benny Baumann works as software developer in the field of software hardening. He is one of the Software Assessors for CAcert and leading the software development and maintainance.

Felix Dörre is student in the Computer Science department at KIT in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is one of the core developers of CAcert's new software while helping to maintain the current source code.