is MSR access in only-read mode safe?

[hervem]

Hello,

I developed a tool based on  (Linux) rdmsr to read some MSR registers (RAPL). And I would like to have this tool installed on large computing clusters.

I know that allowing read AND write of MSR registers for all the users is not safe, mainly due to the write capability.

I suppose that allowing only read (even for all users) is safe, but I failed to find literature on it.

Is there any? Is it obvious?

Thanks in advance for your help,

hervem

[McCalpinJohn]

"Safe" can mean several different things in this context....

Write access to MSRs can fairly easily crash a system.  Read access to MSRs should not be able to crash a system.

Read access to MSRs opens a fair number of security risks.

The project https://github.com/LLNL/msr-safe provides the ability grant different permissions to different MSRs.  Limiting the accessible MSRs to the ones of interest can reduce the uncertainty about security risks.  I have not deployed this package on production systems, but had no trouble getting it to work properly on a test cluster.

[hervem]

Thanks for your help.

I agree, msr-safe is a good candidate to limit the risks. I did not use it yet. 

BTW
In HPC context the users allocate usually nodes with exclusivity access (not shared).
NB : If the node is not allocated in an exclusive mode, you can have a look on what is running on the node (from yourself or not), with or without msr_read.

So safe could be understood as :
By using (only) msr_read, can we access information we should not access as a basic user (eg password, code&data of other users) ? or can we modify the cluster behavior ?
I would say NO, but perhaps I am wrong.