Identification and Authentication in Large-Scale Storage Systems

Abstract

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Large-scale storage systems may service millions of clients. Effectively identifying and authenticating these clients can not only prevent illegal accesses but also eliminate unnecessary redundancies of access control. However, existing security solutions have largely ignored the identification and authentication issues or separately consider them from access control mechanisms. As a result, these solutions either have incurred a high cost of access control or led to new insurmountable problems. In this paper, we discuss the important consideration in designing an appropriate authentication scheme for large-scale storage systems. First, we discuss potential authentication techniques for large-scale storage systems. The looming crisis of PKI, a widely used technology for authentication in today's information security area is discussed and potential alternative technologies to PKI are suggested. Second, by merging authentication into access control we develop a decentralized security architecture for large-scale storage systems, designed to improve the scalability of authentication and reduce the overhead of access control. Finally, we experimentally evaluate how much overhead can be caused when various cryptographic algorithms used in an authentication protocol are applied to a large-scale storage system.