Access control for a replica management database

Abstract

Distributed computation systems have become an important tool for scientific simulation, and a similarly distributed replica management system may be employed to increase the locality and availability of storage services. While users of such systems may have low expectations regarding the security and reliability of the computation involved, they expect that committed data sets resulting from complete jobs will be protected against storage faults, accidents and intrusion. We offer a solution to the distributed storage security problem that has no global view on user names or authentication specifics. Access control is handled by a rendition protocol, which is similar to a rendezvous protocol but is driven by the capability of the client user to effect change in the data on the underlying storage. In this paper, we discuss the benefits and liabilities of such a system.