[Beowulf] Security issues

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Joe Landman wrote:

> Sadly, I feel as if we are playing "whack-a-mole" with these issues.

Well, that's a long time feeling of mine, having to face the same 
issues independent of the size of the group of scientists that have 
to use the computer setup (as this is not cluster specific).

> "c" is 'easy' (yeah, I know its wrong), but we can disable all suid 
> programs on the machine that are accessible from users accounts.

And if something doesn't need suid to be dangerous ?

> "a" is hard.  Academics like to share things.  We need to find a way 
> to let them do this.  Securely.

By all means, let me know if you find something that works - I've been 
trying for close to 10 years :-)

> So we are going to take a different approach.

Can you give more details please ?

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8850
E-mail: bogdan.costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de