Folding Forum

At work our computer security personnel are worried exactly what is being passed back and forth in these work units. I believe they are worried that information is being gathered off of the machines and being passed back. After searching on the net for any security concerns dealing with folding at home and the WU's I have turned up nothing. I believe the privacy gurus would have found something in the 15 years that you have been doing this if there was something to be concerned about. It would not help the cause if you did something like that and no one would use it then. Can anyone tell me exactly what is being passed in and out in these WU's so I can put his mind at ease. My belief is it would be the starting position of each atom when we receive them and we send back the positions of each atom when we are done with the calculations. I am just curious to see if I am half right on that idea. But any information would help with our security personnel.

Thanks in advanced
Joel

To the best of my knowledge, the only thing passed in the WU's is the data needed to describe the protein system being simulated and the results of that simulation run at the end. The client itself passes some basic information about your system - number of CPU cores, type of hardware, OS, etc. - needed to assign WU's appropriate to the hardware and operating system. Beyond that, once installed the client software by default runs with minimum privileges.

There is a FAQ on this with the PG answer here - https://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/#ntoc45.

Here is a list of data fields used by a previous version of the folding client, along with explanations of each field. This information was collected by a third party, not published by Stanford. I don't expect it has changed much since then.

http://fahwiki.net/index.php/Queue.dat

You can also run FAHClient.exe --help to see the current client settings and data options.

Thank you all for the information. I think the list will definitely ease his concerns.
Everyone have a nice day
Joel