Securing wide-area storage in WheelFS

Abstract

WheelFS is a secure wide-area distributed file system that gives applications finegrained control over the various trade-offs inherent in wide-area storage. Because of the security risks of running a wide-area application on the public Internet, WheelFS aims to allow for secure operation in an untrusted network with untrusted clients, while still enforcing access control against these clients and allowing them to safely share data with each other. By using SSH connections and RSA public keys, it gives users a familiar and secure authentication interface and maintains efficient secure communication in an untrusted network. It also uses server-supplied SHA-256 checksums to allow secure client-to-client data sharing between mutually-distrustful clients. Experiments on PlanetLab, a wide-area testbed, shows that wide-area file transfer and cooperative fetch operations take 1.5-2 times as long with these security measures compared to the unsecured prototype.