(See also last year's page: Ideas For Google Summer of Code of 2009.)

​Google Summer of Code

Students: you don't have to use one of the following Ideas. You can come up with your own Ideas, either inspired by these or your own Blue Sky idea. The most important thing is to e-mail the Mentor team (listed at the bottom of this page) saying that you are interested.

Ideas

What could a smart student do in one summer, if they didn't need to worry about getting a summer job to pay the bills?

​Trac tickets labelled 'gsoc' (please add this label to any tickets that might make a good GSoC project).

Deep Security Issues

Want to implement strong security features which advance the state of the art? It isn't easy! To tackle these you'll need to think carefully and to integrate security and usability, which are two halves of the same coin. But you'll have excellent mentors and the support of a wide community of interested security hackers.

• Fix Same-Origin-Policy design issue. Web content from different authors can interact in unintended ways in the victim's browser, such as JavaScript peeking at other frames or referrer headers. Before this project is undertaken, the problem description and proposed solutions need careful design review and consideration! The solutions should be considered prototypes and should be backwards compatible with the Tahoe network. Main ticket: #615 (Can JavaScript loaded from Tahoe access all your content which is loaded from Tahoe?) ​Tickets labelled 'capleak'
  • Domain Mangling approaches:
    • HTTP proxy approach
    • Special scheme handling in browser add-ons
  • ​Caja approach: Require all Javascript to pass the Caja verifier in the Tahoe-LAFS web frontend, then create an interface to the tahoe webapi which matches the intended capability semantics.
• Tahoe-LAFS Cryptography:
  • Help us author a paper proving the security of the crypto that will be used to implement new shorter caps (such as the Elk Point protocol or the "Semi-Private Key" construction from ​http://allmydata.org/~zooko/lafs.pdf ). ​Tickets labelled 'newcaps'

Free The Windows Client

• Make the ​Windows client use only free open-source software. (Implementing WebDAV is an alternative that would achieve a similar effect.)

Connecting Tahoe-LAFS To Other Things

• Filesystem access:
  • improve the FUSE frontend (source code). ​Tickets labelled 'fuse'
  • support WebDAV for access from Windows and various filesystem browsers. ​Tickets labelled 'webdav'
  • integrate Tahoe-LAFS with the GVFS Gnome virtual filesystem
• Explore running a Tahoe-LAFS grid over ​Tor or ​I2P to provide anonymity to servers and/or clients.
• Rescue the neglected C client library ​libtahoeclient_webapi.

Server Selection

Which servers are connected to your client, and which of them have which shares of your files?

• Dynamically migrate shares to maintain file health.
• Use Zeroconf or similar so nodes can find each other on a local network to enable quick local share migration.
• Deal with unreliable nodes and connections in general, getting away from allmydata.com's assumption that the grid is a big collection of reliable machines in a colo under a single administrative jurisdiction. ​Tickets labelled 'availability'
• Abstract out the server selection part of Tahoe-LAFS so that the projects in this category of "grid membership and server selection" can be mostly independent of the rest of Tahoe-LAFS. See also ​this note about standardization of LAFS.
• Write a GUI to visualize and manipulate the set of servers connected and the set holding shares of files.

Networking Improvements

• Dealing with NAT, ideally making it as easy to ignore as possible (taking advantage of upnp-igd and Zeroconf NAT-PMP). ​Tickets labelled 'firewall'
• 'tahoe sync'. Like dropbox (​http://www.getdropbox.com/), the user could have a daemon which keeps the grid in sync with the local filesystem (maybe using inotify for uploads).
• Optimize upload/download transfer speed. ​Tickets labelled 'performance'
• Implement storage server protocol over HTTP. #510

Building Things On Top Of Tahoe

• an interactive tree browser web frontend in JavaScript (Nathan has written most of one -- what can it grow into?)
• Extend and improve the tiddly_on_tahoe implementation.
• Port another light-weight open source web app to Tahoe-LAFS+javascript (calendar, photo album, ​Bespin).

Mentors

Who is willing to spend about five hours a week (according to Google) helping a student figure out how to do it right?

• ​Zooko O'Whielacronx (core coding, Python/C/C++/JavaScript, cryptography)
• ​Jack Lloyd (C/C++/Python, cryptography)
• David-Sarah Hopwood (david-sarah at jacaranda.org) (Python/C/JavaScript, SFTP frontend, security+cryptography)