Here are a number of project ideas. Of course, if you have other ideas of your own, feel free to contact us.

Windows/Mac AVES Port:

Currently, our AVES NAT gateway software is written for the Linux (version 2.2 or above) operating system. Obviously, many people also use Windows PCs or Macs as their NAT gateways.

One of the nicest features of Linux is that it has a packet filtering infrastructure (IP Firewall or ipfw) that enables a user level program to extract interesting packets from the network stack, manipulate them and reinject them back into the network. The AVES NAT gateway software is built on top of this infrastructure.

Porting the AVES NAT gateway software to Windows or Mac will mainly involve locating an existing packet filtering mechanism for these platforms or writing one from scratch. I personally do not know much about Windows or Mac programming, but a little bit of searching on the web tells me that Windows NT/2000 already has some form of packet filtering and NAT support (see this), and there is also a free Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) port to Windows available, this also looks interesting. As for Mac, looks like it has NAT but not general packet filtering built-in. Hopefully there are free software available for packet filtering. I wonder if porting to Mac OS X will be easy since it is UNIX underneath.

So, it might not be that much work involved consider my Linux code is only 2000 lines. Please email eugeneng+aves at cs.cmu.edu if you are interested.

IPv6 Support:

In the future, networks will be deployed using the IPv6 protocol. NAT will be the key technology to connect IPv6 and IPv4 networks, consequently, connectivity between IPv4 and IPv6 networks will also be uni-directional. AVES can be applied to IPv6 NAT to provide bi-directional connectivity. Right now, our AVES implementation does not have support for IPv6 NAT. The main problem is to deal with the transformation of packets from the IPv4 format to the IPv6 format appropriately. If you would like to help us extend the functionality of AVES to work with IPv6, please email eugeneng+aves at cs.cmu.edu.