Corslet: A shared storage system keeping your data private

Abstract

With the exponential growth of digital data, it is becoming more and more popular to store data in shared distributed storage systems inside the same organization. In such shared distributed storage systems, an ordinary user usually does not have the control permission over the whole system, and thus cannot secure data storage or data sharing of his own files. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a new system architecture to secure file storing and sharing efficiently over untrusted shared storage and network environments. Based on this architecture, this paper designs and implements a stackable secure storage system called Corslet. Corslet can run directly on deployed underlying storage systems without modification, while bringing end-to-end confidentiality and integrity as well as efficient access control for user data. For individual users, Corslet is easy to use, and does not require users to maintain or manage any keys on their client machines locally. The Bonnie++ and IOzone benchmark results show that the throughput of Corslet over NFS can achieve more than 90% of native NFS throughput in most tests, proving that Corslet can provide enhanced security for user data while maintaining acceptable performance.