Design for a decentralized security system for network-attached storage

Appeared in Proceedings of the 17th IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies.

Abstract

This paper describes an architecture for a secure file system based on network-attached storage that guarantees end-to-end encryption for all user data. We describe the design of this system, focusing on the features that allow it to ensure that data is written and read only by authorized users, even in the face of attacks such as network snooping and physically capturing the storage media.

Our work shows that such a system is feasible given the speeds of today’s microprocessors, and we discuss benchmark results using several popular encryption and authentication algorithms that could be used on storage devices in such a system. Based on these calculations, we present the overall performance of the system, showing that it is nearly as fast as the non-encrypted file systems in wide use today.

Publication date:
March 2000

Authors:
William E. Freeman
Ethan L. Miller

Projects:
Secure File and Storage Systems

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{freeman-msst00,
  author       = {William E. Freeman and Ethan L. Miller},
  title        = {Design for a decentralized security system for network-attached storage},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 17th IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies},
  pages        = {361–373},
  month        = mar,
  year         = {2000},
}