A Survey of Distributed Capability File Systems and Their Application to Cloud Environments

Abstract

This thesis considers distributed capability systems as a potential solution to securing data in cloud environments. The U.S. Navy, Intelligence Community and Department of Defense have begun a significant investment to leverage scalable, distributed cloud-based solutions for information sharing. We believe capability systems suggest a promising direction for new platforms, a bold approach drawing directly from mature ideas first explored in the 60s and 70s. We survey the properties and limits of existing distributed capability file systems, as a step toward understanding how capability-based designs might serve cloudscale systems. We highlight some lessons learned in our observations and find that, while no existing capability-based distributed file system demonstrates all of the desirable security traits observed of smaller-scale capability systems, it should be possible to define and create one that does, using capabilities carefully designed to obey a set of known properties.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2014
Accession Number
ADA619526

Entities

People

  • Edgar W. Jatho Iii

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Big Data
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Cybersecurity
  • Department Of Defense
  • Governments
  • Information Security
  • Information Systems
  • Insider Threats
  • Instruction Set Architecture
  • Intelligence Community
  • Operating Systems
  • Security
  • Systems Engineering
  • United States Government

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Theoretical Analysis.