Toward securing untrusted storage without public-key operations

ABSTRACT

Adding security capabilities to shared, remote and untrusted storage file systems leads to performance degradation that limits their use. Public-key cryptographic primitives, widely used in such file systems, are known to have worse performance than their symmetric key counterparts. In this paper we examine design alternatives that avoid public-key cryptography operations to achieve better performance. We present the trade-offs and limitations that are introduced by these substitutions.

REFERENCES

• 1: Matt Blaze, A cryptographic file system for UNIX, Proceedings of the 1st ACM conference on Computer and communications security, p.9-16, November 03-05, 1993, Fairfax, Virginia, United States [doi>10.1145/168588.168590]
• 2: R Blom, An optimal class of symmetric key generation systems, Proc. of the EUROCRYPT 84 workshop on Advances in cryptology: theory and application of cryptographic techniques, p.335-338, December 1985, Paris, France
• 3: Carlo Blundo , Alfredo De Santis , Amir Herzberg , Shay Kutten , Ugo Vaccaro , Moti Yung, Perfectly-Secure Key Distribution for Dynamic Conferences, Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.471-486, August 16-20, 1992
• 4: R. Canetti, J. A. Garay, G. Itkis, D. Micciancio, M. Naor, and B. Pinkas. Multicast security: A taxonomy and some efficient constructions. In INFOCOM, pages 708--716, 1999.
• 5: E.-J. Goh, H. Shacham, N. Modadugu, and D. Boneh. SiRiUS: Securing remote untrusted storage. In NDSS. The Internet Society, 2003.
• 6: M. Jakobsson. Fractal hash sequence representation and traversal. In IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2002.
• 7: Mahesh Kallahalla , Erik Riedel , Ram Swaminathan , Qian Wang , Kevin Fu, Plutus: Scalable Secure File Sharing on Untrusted Storage, Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, March 31-31, 2003, San Francisco, CA
• 8: Leslie Lamport, Password authentication with insecure communication, Communications of the ACM, v.24 n.11, p.770-772, Nov. 1981 [doi>10.1145/358790.358797]
• 9: Frank Thomson Leighton , Silvio Micali, Secret-Key Agreement without Public-Key Cryptography, Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.456-479, August 22-26, 1993
• 10: J. Li, M. N. Krohn, D. Mazières, and D. Shasha. Secure untrusted data repository (SUNDR). In OSDI, pages 121--136, 2004.
• 11: David Mazières , Michael Kaminsky , M. Frans Kaashoek , Emmett Witchel, Separating key management from file system security, Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.124-139, December 12-15, 1999, Charleston, South Carolina, United States
• 12: David Mazieres, Don't Trust Your File Server, Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, p.113, May 20-22, 2001
• 13: Alfred J. Menezes , Scott A. Vanstone , Paul C. Van Oorschot, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, Inc., Boca Raton, FL, 1996
• 14: Ralph C. Merkle, A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function, A Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques on Advances in Cryptology, p.369-378, August 16-20, 1987
• 15: Ethan L. Miller , Darrell D. E. Long , William E. Freeman , Benjamin Reed, Strong Security for Network-Attached Storage, Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.1-13, January 28-30, 2002
• 16: D. Naor, A. Shenhav, and A. Wool. One-time signatures revisited: Have they become practical? Manuscript, 2005.
• 17: Adrian Perrig, The BiBa one-time signature and broadcast authentication protocol, Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security, November 05-08, 2001, Philadelphia, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/501983.501988]
• 18: Erik Riedel , Mahesh Kallahalla , Ram Swaminathan, A Framework for Evaluating Storage System Security, Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.15-30, January 28-30, 2002
• 19: A. D. Rubin. Kerberos versus the Leighton-Micali protocol. Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools, 25(11):21--22, 24, 26, Nov. 2000.
• 20: P. Stanton. Securing data in storage: A review of current research. CoRR, cs.OS/0409034, 2004.
• 21: D. Tygar, G. Gibson, and H. Gobioff. Security for network attached storage devices. Technical Report CMU-CS-97-185, Carnegie Mellon University, October 1997.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Access controls

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Authentication

  E. Data
  E.3 DATA ENCRYPTION
      Subjects: Public key cryptosystems

General Terms:
Security

Keywords:
network attached storage, secure file systems