Search any content within the Security Policies

[ethanolivertroy]

This might require an update to the API to index more info from the actual listings - https://github.com/ethanolivertroy/NIST-CMVP-API

[ethanolivertroy]

Implementation Analysis

After reviewing this feature, here are the key challenges identified:

Challenges

• Storage: Security Policy PDFs can be 10-50MB each, with thousands of certificates
• OCR requirement: Some PDFs are scanned images, requiring OCR for text extraction
• GitHub Pages limits: Storing extracted text for all certs may exceed limits
• Processing time: Downloading and extracting all PDFs would take hours in the GitHub Action

Possible Approaches

1. Active certificates only - Start with ~500 active certs, skip historical
2. Key sections only - Extract just TOC, algorithm descriptions, and configuration requirements (smaller, more searchable)
3. External search service - Use a dedicated search backend instead of static JSON
4. On-demand extraction - Extract text when user requests it, cache locally

Dependencies

This would require updates to the NIST-CMVP-API repo to:

• Add PDF text extraction (using pdfplumber or similar)
• Create new endpoint: security-policy-text.json
• Update GitHub Action workflow

Status

Deferring for further planning. Will revisit once we determine the best approach for storage and processing constraints.