GSoC2014 Ideas

OWASP Project Requests

OWASP Hackademic Challenges - New challenges and Improvements to the existing ones

'Brief Explanation:

The challenges that have been implemented so far include: web application challenges covering several vulnerabilities included in the OWASP Top 10, cryptographic challenges, and entire virtual machines including several vulnerabilities. New challenges need to be created in order to cover a broader set of vulnerabilities. Also existing challenges can be modified to accept a broader set of valid answers, e.g. by using regular expressions.

Ideas on the project:

• Simulated simple buffer overflows
• SQL injections
• Man in the middle simulation
• Bypassing regular expression filtering
• Your idea here

Expected Results:

New cool challenges

Knowledge Prerequisites:

Comfortable in PHP, HTML and possibly Javascript. Good understanding of Application Security and related vulnerabilities.

Mentors: Konstantinos Papapanagiotou, Spyros Gasteratos - Hackademic Challenges Project Leaders

OWASP Hackademic Challenges - Source Code testing environment

'Brief Explanation:

Existing challenges are based on a dynamic application testing concept. We would like to work on a project that will give the capability to the attacker to review a vulnerable piece of source code, make corrections and see the result in a realistic (but yet safe) runtime environment. The code can either be run if needed or tested for correctness and security. The implementation challenges of such a project can be numerous, including creating a realistic but also secure environment, testing submitted solutions and grading them in an automatic manner. At the same time there are now numerous sites that support submitting code and then simulate or implement a compiler's functionality.

Expected Results:

A source code testing and improvement environment where a user will be able to review, improve and test the result of a piece of source code.

Knowledge Prerequisites:

Comfortable in PHP, HTML and possibly Java. Good understanding of Application Security, source code analysis and related vulnerabilities.

Mentors: Konstantinos Papapanagiotou, Spyros Gasteratos - Hackademic Challenges Project Leaders

OWASP Hackademic Challenges - CMS improvements

'Brief Explanation:

The new CMS was created during last year's GSOC. We have received feedback from users that suggest various improvements regarding functionality e.g. better user, teacher and challenges management. There are also some security improvements that are needed and in general any functionality that adds up to the educational nature of the project is more than welcome.

Ideas on this project:

• Plugin api and plugin actions interface

An easy way for users to code their own plugins which will modify the appearance of hackademic or add to the functionality.

• Ability to show different articles on the user's home screen

Now each user is served the latest article in her/his home screen. We need the ability for either the teacher/admin to be able to define what article each class is served.

• Ability to define series of challenges

The teacher/admin should be able to define a series of challenges (e.g. 2,5,3,1) which are meant to be solved in that order and if one is not solved then the student can't try the next one.

• Tagging of articles, users, challenges

A user should be able to put tags on articles and challenges if he is a student and on users, classes, articles and challenges if he is a teacher. Also the user should be able to search according to the tags.

• Your idea here

We welcome new ideas to make the project look awesome.

Expected Results:

New features and security improvements on the CMS part of the project.

Knowledge Prerequisites:

Comfortable in PHP and HTML. Good understanding of Application Security and related vulnerabilities if you undertake security improvements.

Mentors: Konstantinos Papapanagiotou, Spyros Gasteratos - Hackademic Challenges Project Leaders

OWASP WebGoatPHP

Description: Webgoat is a deliberately insecure open source software made by OWASP using Java programming language. It has a set of challenges and steps, each providing the user with one or more web application vulnerability which user tries to solve. There are also hints and auto-detection of correct solutions. Since Java is not the most common web application programming language, and it doesn't have many of the bugs other languages such as PHP have when it comes to security, OWASP has dedicated in 2012 an amount of $5000 for promotion of WebGoatPHP.

If you want to know more about WebGoatPHP, I suggest downloading and giving WebGoat a try. It is one of OWASP prides (about 200000 downloads).

Expected Results: WebGoatPHP will be a deliberately insecure PHP web application which operates in different modes. A contest mode where challenges are selected by an admin and the system starts a contest. Admins can open up hints for participants and manage everything. A workshop mode, where the educator has control of the most of application features, as well as feedback of user activities and is ideal for learning environments, and a single mode where someone can browse challenges and solve them.

Knowledge prerequisite: You just need to know PHP. You are supposed to define flawed systems, which is not the hardest thing. Familiarity with web application security and SQL is recommended.

Mentor: Abbas Naderi

OWASP CSRF Guard

Description: CSRF is a complicated yet very effective web attack. The most important thing about CSRF is that it's hard to properly defend against it, specially when it comes to Web 2 and AJAX. We have had discussions on means of mitigating CSRF for years at OWASP, and are now ready to develop libraries for it. Many of the key ideas of this library can be found at [1].

Expected Results: A transparent Apache 2 module properly mitigating all POST CSRF attacks, as well as a lightweight PHP library doing the same.

Knowledge prerequisites: Knowing CSRF and at least one way to defend against it, PHP, C/C++, Linux.

Mentor: Abbas Naderi

OWASP PHP Security Project

Description: OWASP PHP Security project plans to gather around secure PHP libraries, and provide a full featured framework of libraries for secure web applications in PHP, both as separate de-coupled libraries and as a whole secure web application framework. Many aspects of this project are already handled, and are being added to OWASP.

Expected Results: Result of this project is much more security among PHP applications. Most PHP applications are vulnerable and there's no central approach to secure them (due to open source nature). Many people look at OWASP for such information.

Knowledge prerequisite: Anyone with adequate PHP programming language experience (possibly web application development in PHP). There are hard and easy parts of this project. For tougher parts, familiarity with security concepts, advanced SQL, and advanced PHP and web server configuration is required.

Mentor: Abbas Naderi

OWASP RBAC Project

Description: For the last 6 years, improper access control has been the issue behind two of the Top Ten lists.

RBAC stands for Role Based Access Control and is the de-facto access control and authorization standard. It simplifies access control and its maintenance for small and enterprise systems alike. NIST RBAC standard has four levels, the second level hierarchical RBAC is intended for this project.

Unfortunately because of many performance and development problems, no suitable RBAC implementation was available until recently, so developers and admins mostly used ACLs and other forms of simple access control methods, which leads to broken and unmaintainable access control over the time.

OWASP provides the RBAC project, as a stand-alone library with very fast access control checks and standard mature code-base. Currently PHPRBAC which is the PHP version of the RBAC project is released.

Expected Results: Standard NIST level 2 hierarchical RBAC libraries for different programming languages, specially web-based ones such as C/C++/Java/ASP/ASPX/Python/Perl/etc.

Knowledge prerequisite: Good SQL knowledge, library development schemes, familiarity with one of the programming languages.

Mentor: Abbas Naderi

Skill Level: Advanced

For more info, visit phprbac.net