1.  MXCuBE meeting, Diamond, November 19, 2025

    Steering Committee Minutes

# 

## Cybersecurity

The Steering Committee took note of the ESRF summary report, and
wondered about what next step would be required - a cybersecurity WG? It
was emphasised that information exchange if anything happened would be
highly important.

Bill Shepard reported that SOLEIL had suffered an attack that had
penetrated their gitlab computer, which was on the perimeter of their
internal systems, but had not penetrated further. An audit had been made
on SOLEIL security and Bill Shepard promised to produce information on
the results. One proposal had been to install software that continuously
monitored all computers for unusual/suspicious activity, which would
consume 2% of computing resources. There was some scepticism, due to the
resource cost and the possible effect of false alarms. It was noted that
a detected intrusion would cause a complete and immediate shutdown. This
would definitely be warranted in the case of a genuine intrusion; the
BESSY hack had cost 6 months of total shutdown and a further 12 months
of blocked remote access.

MAX IV noted that they were moving towards replacing the VPN access
control with two-factor authentication.

## Collaboration membership

The membership application of the Korean synchrotron is given the green
light. Once this application is finalised the process of updating the
Memorandum of Understanding will be started, which will cover also the
entry of SOLARIS and LS-CAT.

## Working groups

The Steering committee is in favour of having more and active MXCuBE
working groups, but 1) notes that you need an active chair to make sure
the group meets, and 2) worries that too many working groups could
spread the number of active developers too thinly, so that
prioritisation is needed. The user interface WG is seen positively.

## Upcoming meeting

For future meetings it is agreed that status reports should be sent in
and presented over zoom two weeks in advance. The organisers can then
propose the most topical/interesting for presentations at the meeting.
This provides a necessary time saving, as there are now too many
participants to allow for plenary status reports for each. The
organisers should ask specific questions for the status reports to
include as needed.

The next meeting will be at BESSY June 9-12. The MXCuBE code camp will
start Tuesday morning, and the ISPyB meeting Wednesday lunchtime, giving
a day and a half for the code camp. About 15 in-person participants
would be expected for the code camp.

The notion was floated (but not agreed) that the ISPyB meeting could
eventually be remote-only.