Hi Chris,
Ilya's solution uses sudo to submit the job via drmaa after switching to
the actual user's uid and gid. This means giving your Galaxy user sudo
rights to run 3 scripts as root:
* A script to submit jobs
* A script to kill jobs
* A script to chown a directory
This could be tightened up a bit, in the case of the first two by
sudoing directly to the user, rather than to root and then setuid()ing.
In the case of the latter script, a path is passed to the script rather
than a Galaxy job id, so it could be used by the Galaxy user to chown
anything that root can chown. In addition, if your Galaxy data lives in
NFS with root squashing enabled, this script would fail.
Of course, the paths to these scripts are configurable, so they can be
replaced with site-suitable versions.
Another option to avoid sudo entirely would be for Galaxy to start as
root and then drop privileges, but I am not incredibly fond of this
solution, since it allows for the possibility of privilege separation
exploits. Perhaps a stripped down Galaxy data daemon that runs with
elevated privileges, whose sole job it is to manage permissions and move
data?
As with the existing Galaxy implementation, Galaxy's data is not copied
around at job runtime for tool input, it simply exists in one place and
is expected to be locatable on the cluster resource at the same path.
My next development goal is to remove this limitation.
The assumption is also made that tool inputs are readable by the actual
user, which was a problem in some environments.
If administrators prefer to give the Galaxy account the permission to
run jobs as other users directly in the DRM, this would certainly solve
the problem. Galaxy would just need minor modification to take
advantage of the feature.
As you probably recall, there were many people at the GCC brainstorming
this problem, and I don't recall that we ever came up with the perfectly
secure solution. This solution may be good enough for some sites.
If there's a desire for tightened security, I would be happy to review
and accept any work done on that. =)
--nate
Fields, Christopher J wrote:
> Ilya, Nate,
>
> To add a bit of background to the below, we have several clusters on campus
> that use very different accounting systems; some run as a regular cron job to
> process job run info, however others use a qsub wrapper to check service
> units prior to job submission (a byproduct of being part of teragrid/xcede).
> It seems the most direct route to work around accounting-level differences is
> to submit the job as a user (so I'm interested in this solution), but the
> below security questions I mentioned were raised by a number of our local
> cluster sysadmins as well as (if I'm not mistaken) at the conference.
>
> Were these ever addressed, or is it considered an non-issue? Apologies about
> re-sending, I didn't know if this had been answered elsewhere, but this was a
> serious concern that may block us from using some pretty nice HPC resources.
>
> chris
>
> On Nov 1, 2011, at 4:59 PM, Fields, Christopher J wrote:
>
> > I recall at the Galaxy conf there were questions on how secure this is
> > (having the 'galaxy' user submit jobs as someone else). This would involve
> > switching users on the cluster or would require user login information,
> > correct?
> >
> > The way we planned on working around this was to just specify a user
> > account string (using '-A') instead of bothering with switching users. I
> > believe our local cluster disallows switching users via PBS unless the
> > submitter has admin privs, but the accounting string works fine (I suppose
> > one could use the project option as well).
> >
> > chris
> >
> > On Oct 31, 2011, at 6:30 PM, Chorny, Ilya wrote:
> >
> >> I modified drmaa.py to pass the galaxy users path variable to the actual
> >> user. As long as the galaxy user's environment is correct then the actual
> >> user's environment should be correct.
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Glen Beane [mailto:glen.be...@jax.org]
> >> Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 4:20 PM
> >> To: Chorny, Ilya
> >> Cc: Lloyd Brown; Galaxy Dev List
> >> Subject: Re: [galaxy-dev] Clusters, Runners, and user credentials
> >>
> >> Many of us are using the PBS job runner (for TORQUE) and would definitely
> >> be interested in a port.
> >>
> >> How do you deal with making sure the user's environment is configured
> >> properly? We use a python virtualenv and load specific module files with
> >> tested tool versions in our galaxy users startup scripts on our cluster.
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPhone
> >>
> >> On Oct 31, 2011, at 6:29 PM, "Chorny, Ilya" <icho...@illumina.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> BTW, I am not sure if PBS works with drmaa. If not then the code will
> >>> need to be ported to work with pbs.
> >>>
> >>> Ilya
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> -----Original Message-----
> >>> From: galaxy-dev-boun...@lists.bx.psu.edu
> >>> [mailto:galaxy-dev-boun...@lists.bx.psu.edu] On Behalf Of Chorny, Ilya
> >>> Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 3:27 PM
> >>> To: Lloyd Brown; Galaxy Dev List
> >>> Subject: Re: [galaxy-dev] Clusters, Runners, and user credentials
> >>>
> >>> Lyod,
> >>>
> >>> See Nate's email below Title: Actual user code. We have been working on
> >>> implementing this feature in galaxy. The code is still in development but
> >>> feel free to test it out and let us know how it works for you.
> >>>
> >>> Best,
> >>>
> >>> Ilya
> >>>
> >>> -----Original Message-----
> >>> From: galaxy-dev-boun...@lists.bx.psu.edu
> >>> [mailto:galaxy-dev-boun...@lists.bx.psu.edu] On Behalf Of Lloyd Brown
> >>> Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 2:35 PM
> >>> To: Galaxy Dev List
> >>> Subject: [galaxy-dev] Clusters, Runners, and user credentials
> >>>
> >>> I'm a systems administrator for an HPC cluster, and have been asked by a
> >>> faculty member here to try to get galaxy to work on our cluster.
> >>> Unfortunately, there are one or two outstanding questions that I can't
> >>> seem to find the answer to, and I'm hoping someone here can help me out.
> >>>
> >>> In particular, is galaxy, and the PBS runner specifically, capable of
> >>> submitting jobs under specific user names? Essentially, if I set up
> >>> galaxy to push jobs to our cluster, will they all show up under one user
> >>> credential (eg. the "galaxy" user), or can we set it up so that the user
> >>> logged into galaxy, is used to submit the job?
> >>>
> >>> This one is kindof a show-stopper, since our internal policies require
> >>> that all jobs have a specific user credential, with one person per
> >>> username.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks,
> >>> Lloyd
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Lloyd Brown
> >>> Systems Administrator
> >>> Fulton Supercomputing Lab
> >>> Brigham Young University
> >>> http://marylou.byu.edu
> >>> ___________________________________________________________
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