CC-MAIN-2021-31-UNSAFE

Following the release of the curated CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED corpus, this new corpus contains over 5.0 million files collected by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) or synthetically generated by Kudu Dynamics’ “Voice of the Offense” (VoO) team for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)’s SafeDocs Program.

The common-crawl component of this new corpus (over 3.9 million PDF files as collected by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)) includes some truncated PDF files, as described in the paper “Building a Wide Reach Corpus for Secure Parser Development" by Allison et al slides paper. This component was utilized within the SafeDocs program as the starting point for many generated files, as discussed below, and as the Program’s evaluation corpus, and. was then expanded and improved to become CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED.

Why is this corpus "unsafe"?

The corpus contains many files which may cause a parser to segmentation fault (crash), or may cause a parser to hang in an infinite processing loop. There are also many files which will parse differently with different parsers and/or parser options. This will cause issues such as rendering differentials and pdftotext differentials when processing these files. At the time of this corpus release, there is no file in the corpus that is known to be "malicious". However, any file downloaded from the Internet can be dangerous because they may contain viruses, malware, or harmful content that could harm your computer, compromise your personal data, or lead to potential security risks. Therefore, anyone downloading these files should handle them with proper security protocols.

The SafeDocs datasets

This corpus contains file and streaming formats used during the SafeDocs program research, Hackathon, and Evaluation events:

the corpora-pdf-.zip files contains over 1.5 million unsafe PDF files; the corpora-icc-.zip files contains corpora for ICC color profiles; the corpora-nitf-.zip files contains corpora for the National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) file format; and the corpora-video-.zip files contains corpora for several streaming video formats. The corpora-pdf-*.zip files contains over 1.5 million PDF files generated by the VoO team on behalf of the SafeDocs program. The corpus was designed to achieve the necessary diversity and complexity, providing a representative baseline for the assessment of both performer-created parsers and extant PDF parser security. The PDF files leverage three unique sources developed by the SafeDocs TA3 performer, Kudu Dynamics, for the creation of malformed PDF files that may exhibit potentially dangerous behavior in the anti-pattern known as a “shotgun parser”:

• Synthetic and real-world PDF files that resulted in unique call paths through various extant parsers identified by Google’s AFL security-oriented fuzzer;
• Synthetically modified real-world PDF files malformed by a directed PDF semantic- and grammar-aware tool; and
• Synthetically malformed real-world PDF files with byte sequences randomly modified by a PDF syntax-aware tool.

Corpora Structure

The structure of the SafeDocs corpus consists of the following:

• common-crawl-*.zip
  • These files contain an initial extraction of 3,953,920 PDFs from Common Crawl. Note that some PDFs were truncated by Common Crawl when fetched.
• corpora-pdf-*.zip
  • corpora-pdf/hackathonOnePrep – Corpus used to prepare for the study of the PDF format and PDF parsers before SafeDocs Hackathon 1 (December, 2019).
  • corpora-pdf/hackathonOne – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and PDF parsers during SafeDocs Hackathon 1 (December, 2019).
  • corpora-pdf/evalOne – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and evaluation of safe PDF parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 1 (March, 2020).
  • corpora-pdf/hackathonTwo – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and PDF parsers during SafeDocs Hackathon 2 (July, 2020).
  • corpora-pdf/evalTwo – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and evaluation of safe PDF parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 2 (October, 2020).
  • corpora-pdf/hackathonThree – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and PDF parsers during SafeDocs Hackathon 3 (March, 2021).
  • corpora-pdf/evalThree – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and evaluation of safe PDF parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 3 (June, 2021).
  • corpora-pdf/evalFour – Corpus used for the study of the PDF format and evaluation of safe PDF parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 4 (March, 2022).
  • corpora-pdf/testPDFs – Corpus used for simple PDF testing of PDF parsers.
  • corpora-pdf/TA3 – Corpus synthetically generated with various stressful malforms to study the PDF format and PDF parsers.
  • corpora-pdf/issue_trackers – Corpus of PDF files retrieved from issue trackers for various PDF parsers. This data has been formalized into the previously-announced Stressful “Issue Tracker” corpus.
  • corpora-pdf/common_crawl_cmin – Corpus of files from the common_crawl corpus that was minimized via afl-cmin and the poppler:pdftoppm binary.
  • corpora-pdf/govdocs_cmin – Corpus of files from the Govdocs1 corpus that was minimized via afl-cmin and the poppler:pdftoppm binary.
• corpora-icc-*.zip
  • corpora-icc/hackathonFour – Corpus used to study the ICC format and ICC parsers during SafeDocs Hackathon 4 (Nov, 2021).
  • corpora-icc/common_crawl – Corpus used to study the ICC format.
  • corpora-icc/common_crawl_iccs – Corpus used to study the ICC format.
  • corpora-icc/TA3 – Corpus synthetically generated with various stressful malforms to study the ICC format
• corpora-nitf-*.zip
  • corpora-nitf/hackathonFive – Corpus used to study the NITF format and NITF parsers during SafeDocs Hackathon 5 (Nov, 2022).
  • corpora-nitf/nitf – Corpus used to study the NITF format and NITF parsers.
  • corpora-nitf/nitf-bestof – Final collection of the best NITF corpus with stressful malforms.
• corpora-video-*.zip
  • corpora-video/hackathonThree – Corpus used for the study of the MPEG format and evaluation of safe MPEG parsers during SafeDocs Hackathon 3.
  • corpora-video/evalFour – Corpus used for the study of the MPEG format and evaluation of safe MPEG parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 4.
  • corpora-video/evalFourInfo – Information on the corpus used for the study of the MPEG format and evaluation of safe MPEG parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 4.
  • corpora-video/evalSDF – Packet captures of a streaming file transfer used for the evaluation of safe parsers during SafeDocs Evaluation 4.
  • corpora-video/TA4 – Corpus used for the study of the MPEG format and evaluation of safe MPEG parsers.
  • corpora-video/common_crawl_mpegs – Corpus used for the study of the MPEG format and evaluation of safe MPEG parsers

Credits

This dataset was gathered by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology while supporting the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)’s SafeDocs Program. The JPL team included Chris Mattmann (PI), Wayne Burke, Dustin Graf, Tim Allison, Ryan Stonebraker, Mike Milano, Philip Southam, and Anastasia Menshikova.

The JPL and Kudu Dynamics teams collaborated with Peter Wyatt, the Chief Technology Officer of the PDF Association and PI on the SafeDocs program, in the design and documentation of this corpus. The JPL team and PDF Association would like to thank Simson Garfinkel and the Digital Corpora Project for taking ownership of this dataset and publishing it. Our thanks are extended to the Amazon Open Data Sponsorship Program for enabling this large corpus to be free and publicly available as part of the Digital Corpora Project initiative.

Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement by the United States Government or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.

The research was carried out at the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) SafeDocs program. Government sponsorship acknowledged.