The Open Science Grid (OSG) facilitates access to distributed high throughput computing for research across the US, delivering more than 1.2 billion CPU hours to researchers across a wide variety of projects over the last 12 months. The OSG and CTSC are collaborating to assess the security of HTCondor-CE (Compute Element). The HTCondor-CE is the next-generation gateway software for the Open Science Grid (OSG) and is responsible for providing a network service which authorizes remote users and provides a resource provisioning service. Based on the HTCondor software, this CE is a highly-specialized configuration of HTCondor and relies on less-common components, e.g., blahp, the focus of this engagement. HTCondor-CE was developed and adopted to provide the OSG with a more flexible, scalable, and easier-to-manage gateway software.
The primary goal of the CTSC-OSG engagement is to review blahp (pronounced “blop”), part of HTCondor-CE, and to help ensure its design and implementation are secure - that is, it is free of design errors and will function as intended in the face of malicious entities attempting to coerce it to do otherwise.
