Achieving Information Security in Network Computing Systems

The spread of worldwide networks and the technological trend are feeding the progress of network and distributed computing in different directions (Grid, Cloud, Autonomic, Ubiquitous, Pervasive, Volunteer, etc). With regard to information, great amount of data widely (geographically) spread over the network require adequate management, to ensure availability for authorized users only, confidentiality and integrity of information and data or, summarizing, security. In order to adequately address security problems such as insider attacks and identity thefts in network-distributed environments, in this work we propose a lightweight cryptography algorithm, combining the strong and highly secure asymmetric cryptography technique with the symmetric cryptography. The algorithm we propose implements a whole secure file system, which preserves and ensures the security of both data and file system structures (directory, links, etc). In the paper we describe in detail the secure distributed file system structure and the algorithms implementing its interface operations. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we also describe its implementation into a Grid (gLite) environment.