CMU-CS-98-182
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-98-182

Integrity and Performance in Network Attached Storage

Howard Gobioff, David Nagle*, Garth Gibson

December 1998

CMU-CS-98-182.ps
CMU-CS-98-182.pdf

Keywords: File systems management, special-purpose and application-based systems, design study, cryptographic controls, network communication


Computer security is of growing importance in the increasingly networked computing environment.This work examines the issue of high-performance network security, specifically integrity, by focusing on integrating security into network storage system. Emphasizing the cost-constrained environment of storage, we examine how current software-based cryptography cannot support storage's Gigabit/sec transfer rates. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel message authentication code, based on stored message digests. This allows storage to deliver high-performance, a factor of five improvement in our prototype's integrity protected bandwidth, without hardware acceleration for common read operations. For receivers, where precomputation cannot be done, we outline an inline message authentication code that minimizes buffering requirements.

22 pages

*Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University


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