Decentralized access control in distributed file systems

  • Authors:
  • Stefan Miltchev;Jonathan M. Smith;Vassilis Prevelakis;Angelos Keromytis;Sotiris Ioannidis

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;Drexel University;Columbia University;Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (FORTH)

  • Venue:
  • ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The Internet enables global sharing of data across organizational boundaries. Distributed file systems facilitate data sharing in the form of remote file access. However, traditional access control mechanisms used in distributed file systems are intended for machines under common administrative control, and rely on maintaining a centralized database of user identities. They fail to scale to a large user base distributed across multiple organizations. We provide a survey of decentralized access control mechanisms in distributed file systems intended for large scale, in both administrative domains and users. We identify essential properties of such access control mechanisms. We analyze both popular production and experimental distributed file systems in the context of our survey.