Re: Summer Mentorship / Volunteering

From: Matt Borland (matt_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-10-24 14:59:44

> Do any library authors or maintainers:
> 

> * Desire to mentor a student, and
> * have the skill to mentor a student, and
> * have appropriate student work in one of their libraries?
> 

> If yes please reply with the library and the nature of the work :)
> 

> Thanks
>

Chris Kormanyos and I are working on a greenfield cryptography library. While much of the implementation work may be intractable to an undergrad within a short time span, we think there is much that can be done in testing and networking. For testing NIST publishes their testing standards for certification and small test sets. For example in our testing of SHA256 we have 192 NIST provided test vectors, and all the normal tests we write to check every code path. Someone who could digest the FIPS PUBs, write tests, and try their best to break our code would be value added. If we are far along enough in our development cycle to have some TLS support someone to work on forking a boost lib, ripping out OpenSSL, and plugging in our crypto lib would help demonstrate our new library is a viable replacement for future Boost proposal.

As for the desire and skill to mentor a student Chris has been a Boost GSoC mentor a number of times over the years. My previous job was to coach, teach, and mentor people. We have discussed participation in Boost GSoC the past few years, but 2025 is the first time we think we are personally in a good position to do it. 

Matt