GSOC’22 @SCoRe Lab

It all starts from here…

When I thought of entering the world of open source, what could be a better platform than GSOC? I browsed through various organizations from the past year GSOC; I went through their projects, tech stack & code base. Honestly, all of it was overwhelming for me. Either the tech stack was completely alien to me or the topics did not appeal my interest. I was ready to give up. Here, I would like to thank my mother, peers and seniors for pushing me and keeping me alive.

I continued my search until in March I came across Survey6 Project under Web Telescope |SCoRe Lab. My interest in cybersec and networking was matched by Web Telescope.

About Web Telescope

Web Telescope is a sub-org of SCoRe Lab that contributes and promotes cybersecurity research.

My Project: Survey6

To aid cybersecurity researchers in their study about IPv6 research and promote its study, people at Web Telescope have come up with a tool called Survey6 that collects all the IPv6 packets via probes and send the collected packets to the server where the packets are processed and stored for further studies. The collection is done both actively and passively.

My Task

My task here is to create a passive packet collector(probe) that would be Linux based CLI application, the server that would collect the packets and set up effective communication and packet files transfer between the probe and server.

I saw this as an immense opportunity to grow and learn. After contacting the mentor, understanding the project, getting my doubts cleared, learning some of the tech stack and making a prototype, I finally typed a proposal.

And, there was a long wait until the selection announcement ( 20th May, 2022 ). I was indeed thrilled.

Well, then started community bonding period: I had a meeting with my mentor where I got to know so much more about the project, aligned my vision of the project with the vision of the organization. We refined certain implementation details and discussed the tech stack. I used the rest of my period to get familiar with other tools from the tech stack and architecture details.

Gratitude

I am grateful to my mentor, Ravindu De Silva for the selection. I also thank my mom and my peers at Society of Robotics & Automation, VJTI who motivated me to make an application. Special thanks to Kush Kothari for helping me review my application. Sincere thanks to all those people whom I have crossed path with.

I am looking forward to a great summer with SCoRe Lab and hope my contributions make some difference.

Thanks for reading all the way here. I’ll keep you updated with my updates. Stay tuned!!