The SEARCCH hub is a cybersecurity research artifact portal that builds and maintains a catalog of cybersecurity research artifacts housed in different places on the internet. The search engine enables researchers rapidly find relevant artifacts that will help with their own research through the use of cybersecurity domain-specific metadata about artifacts, including relationships to other related artifacts. The portal also facilitates a community around these artifacts, allowing researchers to share the location of their artifacts with the community and their experience with different artifacts.

An artifact is a tangible output from scientific research. Artifacts include datasets, code, publications, experimental methodologies, etc. While SEARCCH does catalog publications, its emphasis is on non-publication artifacts that can be more difficult to find and on their relationships to existing publications.

While SEARCCH is a catalog and search engine for artifacts stored in disparate locations across the Internet, it does not automatically crawl the Internet as do other search engines. Artifacts must be submitted to the hub for import. The SEARCCH team pre-populated the catalog with many artifacts. The working model, however, is for researchers to submit their own artifacts for cataloging. Researchers should first check to see if older artifacts are in the hub and then submit if they are not found.

Use the SEARCCH importer service to create and import data and code artifact metadata into the SEARCCH catalog. Please note that SEARCCH does not store the actual artifacts. Artifacts must be published on the internet with a valid URL to be imported into the hub.

SEARCCH supports assisted import and fully manual import. Artifacts published on GitHub, ACM digital library, IEEE Xplore, USENIX web site publication, arXiv, Papers With Code, Zenodo, and generic git repositories (reachable using https) can be imported using the assisted import function (the default). The import assistant will scan artifacts in these repositories and automatically populate the import web form for user review. The user can accept the field contents as is or make any modifications desired.

Artifacts stored on other online locations (e.g., on personal websites) can be manually imported by entering all the fields required. Entered data may be saved iteratively by clicking "SAVE".

Once artifact metadata has been confirmed as being correct, click "PUBLISH" to publish the artifact information in the catalog.

Please see the best practices and considerations for SEARCCH hub curation, and then visit https://hub.cyberexperimentation.org/importer to start importing your work.

No. Researchers are free to browse the SEARCCH hub contents to find and access useful artifacts in support of their own research. It is our hope that over time, researchers will generate artifacts that have broader use, make them freely available on the Internet, and index them in the SEARCCH catalog so others can quickly find and reuse them.

There is no cost to use SEARCCH. It is open to all researchers in the cybersecurity community.

A SEARCCH account is not required to browse the catalog and search for artifacts. Accounts are required to submit artifacts to the SEARCCH catalog and to rate and comment on existing artifacts.

SEARCCH currently leverages single sign-on from GitHub.com. To sign in, click on “LOGIN” in the upper right hand corner and log in using your GitHub account. If you do not have a GitHub account, please visit https://github.com/signup to sign up for an account. SEARCCH may, in the future, use additional single sign-on sources.

Generally, code and data are different logcial components and should be submitted separately. SEARCCH supports the ability to link related artifacts with a set of pre-defined relationships. Please see the best practices and considerations for SEARCCH hub curation for more information.

This feature is not yet implemented in the hub. To take ownership, please contact the SEARCCH team using the feedback form.

During the import process you can choose to edit any of the automatically generated metadata. Any changes you make will be saved and reflected in the artifact once you’ve published it.

If your artifact is already published and needs revision, please contact the SEARCCH team using the feedback form.

This feature is not yet implemented in the hub. If you need to withdraw your artifact, please contact the SEARCCH team using the feedback form.

Please do not submit feedback if you are having issues with a tool. The SEARCCH team does not have direct experience with most of the artifacts that are in the system and will be unable to provide assistance.

First contact the author and try to work out any issues or misunderstandings. Use the SEARCCH entry to identify the tool’s owner/author, and contact the owner directly for tool support. If you still have issues with the tool after reaching out for support, you can try asking a question using the review tool and leaving your contact info there.

You can also share your experience with the tool by leaving a review of the artifact in the hub. Please try to be constructive, understanding that most tools are not products; they are typically shared for use “as is”. If the tool is not maintained, leaving a review that says so and giving the artifact a low rating can help others. We also encourage sharing positive experiences.

Please do not submit feedback if you are having issues with a dataset. The SEARCCH team does not have direct experience with most of the artifacts that are in the system and will be unable to provide assistance.

First contact the author and try to work out any issues or misunderstandings. Use the SEARCCH entry to identify the dataset’s owner/author, and contact the owner directly for support. If you still have issues with the dataset after reaching out for support, you can try asking a question using the review feature. Be sure to leave your contact information so folks can reach out to you.

You can also share your experience using the data by leaving a review of the artifact in the hub. Please try to be constructive in your comments. E.g., if you found a way to fix broken labeling and were then able to use the dataset, share how to do that. We also encourage sharing positive experiences.

Direct profile picture upload is not yet supported. The hub automatically uses your GitHub avatar. If you do not have a GitHub avatar, the hub queries gravatar.com for profile pictures associated with your registered SEARCCH email address.

If you would like your profile picture to show up in the SEARCCH hub, either set an avatar image on GitHub.com by visiting https://github.com/settings/profile or go to https://gravatar.com and register (or add) the email address you used for SEARCCH.

SEARCCH is developed under a collaboration between the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), the University of Utah (Utah), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and SRI International (SRI).

SEARCCH is funded under cooperative grants from the National Science Foundation. Grant numbers are CNS-1925773, CNS-1925616, CNS-1925588, and CNS-1925564.