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6 Limitations

One limitation of our block-based security approach is that we do not support files that are writable but not readable. This is because, under our scheme, to execute partial writes (writes to only part of a block), the client first needs to read the block's old contents--which requires read access--so that he can modify it. However, it is possible to overcome this problem by either having the disks support partial writes directly, or by having all such writes go through the metadata server.

We also do not support underlying file systems in which a block can contain data belonging to multiple files (e.g., file systems in which the tails of many files are stored in a single block), because a block is the smallest unit of access control in our scheme. However, this problem can be overcome by changing capabilities so that they can optionally restrict access to a range of bytes within a block and by allowing disks to accept partial read and write requests.

Finally, with a log-based file system, it is not easy to exploit direct client access to disk when writing to the log, because accesses to the log need to be serialized. (This is not, however, a drawback of our security scheme, but rather a general limitation of asymmetric shared file systems with network-attached disks.) One possible solution is to make the disk the serialization point, but doing so would require adding considerable functionality to the disk.


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Next: 7 Related work Up: Block-Level Security for Network-Attached Previous: 5.3 Andrew benchmark with
Mark Lillibridge 2003-01-06