AWARDS: An Adaptive Write Strategy for Secure Local Disk Systems

Mais Nijim    Xiao Qin*    Tao Xie    Mohammed Alghamdi

Department of Computer Science

New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

801 Leroy Place, Socorro, New Mexico 87801

Since security is of critical importance for modern storage systems, it is imperative to protect stored data from being tampered or disclosed. Although an increasing number of secure storage systems have been developed, there is no way to dynamically choose security services to meet disk requests' flexible security requirements. Furthermore, existing security techniques for disk systems are not suitable to guarantee desired response times of disk requests. We remedy this situation by proposing an adaptive strategy (referred to as AWARDS) that can judiciously select the most appropriate security service for each write request while endeavoring to guarantee the desired response times of all disk requests. Experimental results show that AWARDS significantly improves security and overall performance over an existing scheme by up to 325.0% and 358.9% (with averages of 199.5% and 213.4%).

This paper appeared in the Proc. of the 25th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC'06), Phoenix, AZ, April 2006. * Contact author.  http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~xqin

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