Scalable Security for Petascale Parallel File Systems

Petascale, high-performance file systems often hold sensitive data and thus require security, but authentication and authorization can dramatically reduce performance. Existing security solutions perform poorly in these environments because they cannot scale with the number of nodes, highly distributed data, and demanding workloads. To address these issues, the authors developed Maat, a security protocol designed to provide strong, scalable security to these systems. Maat introduces three new techniques. Extended capabilities limit the number of capabilities needed by allowing a capability to authorize I/O for any number of client-file pairs.