Fine-Grained Access Control in the Chirp Distributed File System

Although the distributed file-system is a widely used technology in local area networks, it has seen less use on the wide area networks that connect clusters, clouds, and grids. One reason for this is access control: existing file-system technologies require either the client machine to be fully trusted, or the client process to hold a high value user credential, neither of which is practical in large scale systems. To address this problem, the authors have designed a system for fine-grained access control which dramatically reduces the amount of trust required of a batch job accessing a distributed file-system.