Administering Platform LSF - SAS

About User Authentication
Security of LSF authentication
UNIX
Windows
All authentication methods supported by LSF depend on the security of the
root account on all hosts in the cluster. If a user can get access to the root
account, they can subvert any of the authentication methods. There are no
known security holes that allow a non-root user to execute programs with
another user’s permission.
Some system adminstrators have particular concerns about security schemes
involving RFC 1413 identification daemons. When a request is coming from an
unknown host, there is no way to know whether the identification daemon on
that host is correctly identifying the originating user.
LSF only accepts job execution requests that originate from hosts within the
LSF cluster, so the identification daemon can be trusted.
The system environment variable LSF_ENVDIR is used by LSF to obtain the
location of lsf.conf, which points to the LSF configuration files. Any user
who can modify system environment variables can modify LSF_ENVDIR to
point to their own configuration and start up programs under the lsfadmin
account.
All external binaries invoked by the LSF daemons (such as esub, eexec, elim,
eauth, and queue level pre- and post-execution commands) are run under the
lsfadmin account.
By default, external authentication is installed on UNIX. If you use the
identification protocol (identd) for authentication, LSF uses a port in the UNIX
privileged port range, so it is not possible for an ordinary user to start a hacked
identification daemon on an LSF host.
On UNIX, this means that authentication is done using privileged ports and
binaries that need to be authenticated (for example, bsub) are installed setuid
to root.
By default, external authentication is installed on Windows. You may disable
external authentication by disabling the LSF_AUTH parameter in the lsf.conf
file.
On Windows, privileged ports authentication does not provide any security
because Windows does not have the concept of setuid binaries and does not
restrict which binaries can use privileged ports. A security risk exists in that a
user can discover the format of LSF protocol messages and write a program
that tries to communicate with an LSF server. The LSF default external
authentication should be used where this security risk is a concern.
Only the parameters LSF_STARTUP_USERS and LSF_STARTUP_PATH are used
on Windows. You should ensure that only authorized users modify the files
under the %SYSTEMROOT% directory.
Once the LSF services on Windows are started, they will only accept requests
from LSF cluster administrators. To allow other users to interact with the LSF
services, you must set up the lsf.sudoers file under the directory specified
by the %SYSTEMROOT% environment variable.
See the Platform LSF Reference for the format of the lsf.sudoers file.
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Administering Platform LSF