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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T11:08:00+00:00

How do OpenMPI and MPICH handle security when I send MPI messages between the

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How do OpenMPI and MPICH handle security when I send MPI messages between the processes over TCP/IP sockets?

In particular, how do they prevent other users of the same network from connecting to a listening socket and sending fake MPI messages?

The specific scenario is the following:

  • The administrators are trusted. Untrusted users do not have a physical access to any hardware or network. Untrusted users do not have root access.
  • However, untrusted users can run their own programs in the cluster; the cluster nodes are typical Linux boxes. In particular, untrusted users can open TCP connections from any machine to any other machine in the cluster and send arbitrary messages.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    J Teller’s right; MPI doesn’t really do this, and it shouldn’t. That’s a design decision based on the use case of MPI.

    MPI users are the sorts of people who pay lots of money for interconnects with sub-microseconds latency. The overhead of some sort of cryptographic signing of messages would be completely unacceptable for this community.

    And it wouldn’t really help at any rate. The way MPI is used is as a message transport interface within a controlled environment – nodes in a limited-access cluster, or maybe machines in a compute lab. If a malicious user gains enough control of one of these nodes to interfere with MPI communications, there are far easier ways to disrupt the communication than sniffing packets, figuring out what stage of the computation is underway, and doing some kind of man-in-the-middle attack. One could just alter the memory of the running job, or more easily, simply overwrite the results on the shared file system. (notice simply sending forged MPI messages might well be noticed, as the “real” messages would pile up, using resources and possibly crashing the job; similarly, intercepting messages without relaying them would almost certainly result in deadlock).

    These arguments don’t apply so strongly to distributed computing, of course, say BOINC-style: but MPI isn’t well suited for that sort of use anyway.

    Nothing of course stops an MPI user who does have this sort of security requirement from simply sending a pgp-style signature along with every message and incorporating that into their code; but a mechanism for doing that is not part of MPI per se, and that’s certainly the right decision.

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