The COAST Security Archive Group is composed of a number of students and faculty within the COAST Laboratory at Purdue University who are re-designing and maintaining the storage of possibly the largest publicly available collection of security related material in the Internet.

Purpose of the Group

The purpose of the COAST Security Archive Group within COAST is to maintain the largest publicly available collection of security related material in the Internet.

Issues that the group is concerned with include:

  • Keeping the extremely dynamic contents of the archive current.
  • Providing methods for users to easily search the contents of the archive.
  • Maintaining a single index and database that is exported to several different views, including World Wide Web, ftp, and gopher.

What's the Problem?

The main problem faced is the efficient management of such highly dynamic information. The sites we mirror are changing constantly and we must maintain the most recent copies of those sites. As well, there are constantly new sites starting up, new papers, new tools, and much more information that must be added into the archive.

The other major problem that we encounter is users being able to find what they are looking for in the archive. With so much information, it is difficult to navigate through all the data to find what you are looking for.

What We Hope to Achieve

Our group has a number of different goals for this project including:

  • Re-organizing the structure of the index.
  • Improving the search engines for the archive.
  • Making the different views more consistent with each other.
  • Partial automation of updating the contents of the archive.
  • Adding tools, documents and miscellaneous security related items to the archive.

Sources of Related Information

Current Status

We are currently moving in to a database system that was written in-house just for the archive. One will be allowed to do searches, add tools, links to the hotlist, documents, etc. on the fly.

Todd O'Boyle is preparing a small paper on his experiences in building the system and maintaining the archive.

Members of the Group

  • Professor Gene Spafford, COAST Director
  • Tom Daniels, Graduate student
  • Todd O'Boyle, Undergraduate student
  • Stuart Robertson, Undergraduate student
  • Andrew Sydelko, Undergraduate student
  • Greg Bujak, Undergraduate student
coast-proj-archive@cs.purdue.edu