Hi Peter, Thanks for the advice. I was trying to say that the potential users for this case will run the tool on: 1. cloud instances that they own 2. PBS/Torque/SLURM interfaced HPC resources which they will have authenticated access to. This means that say in the worse case if some one chooses to run a forkbomb, it will only kill her own resource. In my opinion this is no less secure than say I wrap a forkbomb into a torque script and submit it to my department cluster. I am accountable and traceable to any harm I do this way. The benefit to users on the other hand will be that they can easily test their arbitrary applications to run on a larger scale via the task-parallelism provided by Swift. Once a user is satisfied with the behavior of her task on a compute node via Galaxy, she can follow our recipe which will concretize her implementation as a tool to be used in practice. Were there any scenarios you had in mind that would lead to security issues? Thanks, Ketan On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock@googlemail.com>wrote:

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 8:26 PM, Ketan Maheshwari <ketan@mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

...

Is it possible to write a type file "bin_or_exe" which can detect the executable bit of data before they are part of Galaxy's indexed data.

Thanks, Ketan

You haven't convinced me this is a good idea, but I would try this by defining a new datatype class in Python with a sniffer method which just checks for the executable bit (probably defined as a subclass of the binary datatype, see [1]) and then add this and its sniffer to the datatype XML file.

Peter

[1] https://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-central/src/default/lib/galaxy/datatypes...

-- Ketan