The project I submitted to GAIM was to secure conversations on online messengers.

Most of online messengers like MSN Messenger just send the conversations in clear on the network. Everyone can read all conversation going through a hub with a program like Ethereal, or even through switches with some arp-poisoning. This can be anoying, especialy (but not limited to) on a 255.255.240.0 campus subnet :p

So the application I'm going to write would basically be a local proxy-server that will exchange keys with the needed contacts and transparently encrypt and sign the conversations. I'm planning to write this in C#. I'm already familiar with the MSN Messenger Protocol, but plan to write it in a way that it will be easily extendable for other messenger protocols as AOL, Yahoo Messenger, ...

I know, it's not really an original project, as there already are some commercial applications handling this, but I think closed-source security is like locking a door when it's still open... And I already planned to write this during the summer-break before I heard of the SoC. (Actually I heard of the SoC in the evening of June, 13th :p)

If someone is interested and/or has some experiences with other messenger protocols, you can contact me at SecuredMessenger at gmail dot com.