Title: SAFIUS - A secure and accountable filesystem over untrusted storage

Speaker: K. Gopinath and V. Sriram, Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore India

Date/Time: Friday, March 29, 2008, 10:00 am

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: We describe SAFIUS, a secure accountable file system that resides over an untrusted storage. SAFIUS provides strong security guarantees like confidentiality, integrity, prevention from rollback attacks, and accountability. SAFIUS also enables read/write sharing of data and provides the standard UNIX-like interface for applications. To achieve accountability with good performance, it uses asynchronous signatures; to reduce the space required for storing these signatures, a novel signature pruning mechanism is used. SAFIUS has been implemented on a GNU/Linux based system modifying OpenGFS. Preliminary performance studies show that SAFIUS has a tolerable overhead for providing secure storage: while it has an overhead of about 50\% of OpenGFS in data intensive workloads, it is comparable (or better in some cases) to OpenGFS in metadata intensive workloads.

Bio:  Dr. K. Gopinath graduated from IIT-Madras with a B.Tech. degree and from University of Wisconsin, Madison with an MS in Computer Science. After working at Advanced Micro Devices as a Product Planning Engineer, he joined Stanford University for a Ph.D.(completed '88). After a brief stint as a PostDoc at Stanford and then at Sun Microsystems Labs, he joined IISc as a faculty in 1990.  His research interests are primarily in the computer systems area (Operating Systems, Computer Systems Security, Software Verification, Programming Languages & Compilers).

CSRI POC: Ron Oldfield, (505) 284-9153