How about, as a prerequisite to a larger encryption library, more cryptographic hashes?
For instance, UUID has an SHA-1, but would rather not maintain its own. Also, there are MD5-based UUIDs that the library can't provide yet, since it lacks an MD5 hasher.
Except for the scope (I think this might be a big small), I think this would make a good SOC project. MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, with a place for the current NIST contest winner when it is decided.
If there is time, the concepts can be used to implement some symmetrical encryption algorithms (RC4, RC5, AES, etc).
I think that's a very good idea. It might be worth pointing out that there is a boost.crypto submission in the vault [1] that seems to implement some of these algorithms. We should take a closer look at this library before suggesting a GSoC project. I'm pretty confident that this could (should?) be a good Boost library. Andrew Sutton andrew.n.sutton@gmail.com [1] http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=boost_crypto.zip&directory=&