Security Concern

When I Google SETI@Home, I don't get anything about male enhancement either. It really sounds like the system you're doing the search(es) on are already compromised.

As a Systems Administrator myself, I can understand the concerns about security that one may have. I can only offer the following assurances:

1) SETI@Home has been running since 1999. I have not seen nor heard of any reports of hacking being done through the SETI@Home client software or BOINC framework.

2) Since joining the BOINC framework, and more specifically BOINC v6.x, the project and applications are "sandboxed" away from the rest of the system. That is, special user and group accounts are created and given very minimal permissions limited to only what a project would need to access on a system (e.g. the project's data folder). Note that this feature is currently not supported on Domain Controller PCs due to the installer's inability to add groups to AD.

3) The few reports of malware being spotted in SETI@Home workunits or the SETI@Home executable have all been verified as false positives. Most heuristics built into anti-virus/anti-malware programs are overly simplistic in that they simply look to see if a single process is hogging all the CPU resources, which can be indicative of a worm or trojan, and will mark the erraneously mark the executable as a potential threat. The workunits themselves all contain recorded noises from space, and the probability of this random digital representation of the noise to look like some virus code is actually pretty high. Since the workunit files themselves are not executable, there is no way they could do harm in the first place, so they can be safely ignored.


I run SETI@Home on my home domain controllers and networked nodes, but I do not run them on the servers that I have control over at my place of employment, simply because the company I work for deals in highly sensitive information and is one of the largest corporations in the world that moves more money per day than most banks. Every hard drive at the company must be encrypted per our security policies. All data traffic is monitored, and the last thing I need is to have my fellow SysAdmins always wanting to point an accusatory finger toward BOINC and SETI@Home when something goes wrong. I know how it is as a SysAdmin, the the first unknown is always to blame.

The risk is completely up to you, but do make sure you get permission first. There has been some history with employees running BOINC on machines for which they did not have permission, and the company promptly terminated the employee's services and proceeded with a lawsuit for stolen resources (CPU cycles, network bandwidth, internet bandwidth, etc.).

If you're concerned about security at all, then simply don't run SETI on any server of importance. In fact, if you're interested in running SETI@Home, I would recommend only running it on your home PCs.

As a matter of fact, I would suggest running it on your home PCs first so you can observe the behavior of the program before making your decision to run it on any servers at your workplace.

And as always, feel free to ask any questions you may have and there's an entire community waiting to help answer them as best they can.

There was the one guy wayyyyy in the Pre-BOINC era that added S@H to a viral infection as I recall. basically he was forcing people to run seti against their will and on his account. Needless to say that didn't last long

While that may be true, that isn't the same as compromising a system through SETI@Home or BOINC. That would be evidence of someone hacking a computer through other means and then putting SETI on the system.

From a security standpoint of the application itself, BOINC nor SETI@Home have been using to infiltrate a system by leaving insecure ports open, primarily because they use the web standard TCP port 80 and secure port 443 on some projects for communications. If someone hacks your machine through port 80, it's more likely you have a major flaw elsewhere and it wasn't because of SETI@Home or BOINC.