Two August events will focus on making HDF5 more transparent, inspectable, and secure. At FOSSY 2026, the HDF Group's Gerd Heber will present a GNU poke-based, machine-readable HDF5 file-format specification and tools. The following week, the HDF5 SHINES / Safe-OSE workshop at SSDBM 2026 will bring together HDF5 developers, users, integrators, security practitioners, administrators, data managers, and researchers to discuss risks, audit findings, mitigation priorities, and practical next steps. Remote participation is available for the workshop.
Dates:
1. FOSSY 2026, Thursday, August 6, 2026, 3:00–3:45 PM PDT, room MCLD 2018, Vancouver, https://2026.fossy.ca/schedule/presentation/421/
2. HDF5 SHINES / Safe-OSE workshop, Wednesday, August 12, 2026, at SDSC / UC San Diego (in person or remote Zoom participation; Registration required - https://ssdbm.org/2026/register) https://ssdbm.org/2026/workshop-safe-ose.html
Audiences:
- Security researchers:
“Help define the threat model for HDF5: malformed files, metadata trust
boundaries, plugin loading, supply-chain risk, and file-format-aware
validation.”
- Administrators / HPC centers:
“What should your site do when users bring arbitrary HDF5 files, filters, VOL
connectors, VFDs, and long-lived data into
shared infrastructure?”
- Developers/maintainers:
“Machine-readable HDF5 specifications, GNU poke pickles, validation tools,
conformance testing, fuzzing targets, and safer extension mechanisms.”
- Users/scientists:
“What do safety, security, and privacy mean when your experiment, simulation,
model, or archive is stored in HDF5?”
- Digital librarians/archivists:
“HDF5 as long-lived scientific data: preservation, metadata exposure, trust,
validation, repair, and evidence that a file means what it claims to mean.”
Received on Wed Jul 15 2026 - 10:11:53 EDT