The COAST Archive

Overview

The COAST Security Archive is possibly the largest collection of security related material in the Internet. The archive was born as an ftp archive which contained several hundred megabytes of security related papers, tools and FAQS. It has since expanded with the addition of a Gopher interface and more descriptive Web pages.

This archive is a supported project of the COAST group in the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue University. COAST (Computer Operations, Audit, and Security Technology) is a multi-project, multi-investigator research group focused on providing security information and tools to the Internet community.

The maintenance of this archive is a complex task. This document presents the basic concepts that must be thoroughly understood by all maintainers of the archive. As new students and maintainers arrive, this should be the first stop towards the successful immersion into what some have described as an impossible task; mainly, the maintenance and improvement of the Security Archive.

Information Management

During the development of the archive, one of the first problems we were faced with was the efficient management of highly dynamic information. The questions that typically arose were: Is this tool in the archive? How do I find this tool in the archive? Who is responsible for the addition of this tool to the archive? What is this tool? and How do I find the author of this tool? We built databases of file and author information and provided tools that allowed users to quickly locate the desired tool or paper in the archive.