8TB! NASA JPL creates the world's largest PDF document library for malware research

CTOnews.com, June 16 (Xinhua)-- data scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have announced the creation of the world's largest PDF document library for malware research to advance the DARPA Security documents (SafeDocs) program.

PDF is an acronym for portable document format, a complex file type that can contain images, movie files, interactive forms, 3D models, and so on.

JPL said it had collected 8 million PDF files and the complete data set totaled about 8 TB, making it the largest publicly available corpus of its kind. JPL works with the non-profit organization PDF Association to develop a variety of tools to deal with online threats.

CTOnews.com translates the contents of JPL data scientist Tim Allison as follows:

PDF format has a wide range of uses, such as contracts, legal documents, 3D engineering design, etc. But the PDF format is also complex and can hide malicious code in different forms.

To meet these and other challenges of PDF, a large number of real-world PDF samples need to be collected from the Internet to create a shared, freely available resource for software experts.