Unifying File System Protection

This paper describes an efficient and elegant architecture for unifying the meta-data protection of journaling file systems with the data integrity protection of collision- resistant cryptographic hashes. Traditional file system journaling protects the ordering of meta-data operations to maintain consistency in the presence of crashes. However, journaling does not protect important system meta-data and application data from modification or misrepresentation by faulty or malicious storage devices. With the introduction of both storage-area networking and increasingly complex storage systems into server architectures, these threats become an important concern.

This paper presents the protected file system (PFS), a file system that unifies the meta-data update protection of journaling with strong data integrity. PFS computes hashes from file system blocks and uses these hashes to later verify the correctness of their contents. Hashes are stored within a system log, apart from the blocks they describe, but potentially on the same storage system. The write-ahead logging (WAL) protocol and the file system buffer cache are used to aggregate hash writes and allow hash computations and writes to proceed in the background.

PFS does not require the sharing of secrets between the operating system and the storage system nor the deployment of any special cryptographic firmware or hardware. PFS is an end-to-end solution and will work with any block-oriented device, from a disk drive to a monolithic RAID system, without modification.