What security engineers do at Mozilla is critical — not for just Firefox users, but for the whole Web. If you’ve ever used the OWASP Zed Attack Proxy, read our security guidelines on SSH and TLS or evaluated your website using the HTTP Observatory, then you have benefitted from the work of Mozilla’s security teams. That’s why we make sure to recruit some of the world’s best talent in the field who want to have a real impact on the Web’s security.

Mozilla Winter of Security (MWoS) is an opportunity for us to do just that, inviting students to pair up with our engineers to contribute to some of Mozilla’s security projects. Today we are announcing that the third-ever MWoS is open for applications.

Every year, we select projects that present an interesting security challenge. For mentors, MWoS is an opportunity to open projects from the Mozilla ecosystem to external contributors, and receive help to make progress in areas they may not have time to focus on. For students, MWoS is a gateway to the open source security world and a chance to solve real-world problems. This mutually beneficial formula has led 33 students to write code for 16 security projects in the last two years. Several of these projects are now fully integrated in the work we do to keep Mozilla and the Internet safe. Take the TLS Observatory, a platform developed by Dimitris Bachtis from Greece (MWoS 2014) that helps operators configure HTTPS properly on their sites. Another example is the MIG Sandbox, a Go package implementing Linux seccomp to secure Mozilla Investigator, and written by Teodora Băluță, Vladimir Diaconescu and Constantin-Alexandru Tudorică from Romania (MWoS 2015).

This year, MWoS has expanded to include Mozilla’s Crypto team with five projects for NSS, the network security library of Firefox. Alongside cryptography, the 2016 edition of MWoS will feature twelve projects spread across various disciplines, including web and infrastructure security. The projects are:

MIG: A web interface for Mozilla Investigator

ZAP: Field Enumeration

ZAP: Form Handling

ZAP: Automated authentication detection and configuration

Plug’n’hack / ringleader: Support for e10s (and more)

NSS: Demos

NSS: Server integration

NSS: SHA-3 Implementation

NSS: Formal Verification

NSS: TLS Interoperability

ssh_scan: Improving Scalability and Feature Set

Security Testing Workflow and Toolchain for Python Websites and Services

A full list of projects with their details is available at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Automation/Winter_Of_Security_2016.

To apply, teams must be engaged in a university program and their professor must agree to give the team credits for their MWoS project. Our experience tells us this requirement ensures students have the time and motivation to work on their project, and helps provide a better mentoring experience for everyone.

Applications open today and will close on September 15th. If you are a professor, we encourage you to tell your students about MWoS. If you are a student looking to have a real impact on the security of the Web, start assembling your team, and fill out the application form before September 15th. We will contact the teams and let them know if they have been selected within two weeks after the deadline.

If you have any questions about the MWoS program or the projects, please contact the mentors directly by email and on Mozilla’s #security IRC channel. We look forward to having you join us!