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USENIX 2002 Annual Technical Conference, Freenix Track - Paper    [USENIX 2002 Technical Program Index]

Pp. 181–194 of the Proceedings
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Enhancing NFS Cross-Administrative Domain Access

Joseph Spadavecchia and Erez Zadok
Stony Brook University
{joseph,ezk}@cs.sunysb.edu

Abstract:

The access model of exporting NFS volumes to clients suffers from two problems. First, the server depends on the client to specify the user credentials to use and has no flexible mechanism to map or restrict the credentials given by the client. Second, when the server exports a volume, there is no mechanism to ensure that users accessing the server are only able to access their own files.

We address these problems by a combination of two solutions. First, range-mapping allows the NFS server to restrict and flexibly map the credentials set by the client. Second, file-cloaking allows the server to control the data a client is able to view or access, beyond normal Unix semantics. Our design is compatible with all versions of NFS. We have implemented this work in Linux and made changes only to the NFS server code; client-side NFS and the NFS protocol remain unchanged. Our evaluation shows a minimal average performance overhead and, in some cases, an end-to-end performance improvement.




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Erez Zadok 2002-04-17

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 10-15, 2002, Monterey Conference Center, Monterey, California, USA.
Last changed: 16 May 2002 ml
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