Network-Attached Secure Disks

Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) is 1997–2001 research project of Carnegie Mellon University, with the goal of providing cost-effective scalable storage bandwidth.

Overview

NASD reduces the overhead on the file server (file manager) by allowing storage devices to transfer data directly to clients. Most of the file manager's work is offloaded to the storage disk without integrating the file system policy into the disk. Most client operations like Read/Write go directly to the disks; less frequent operations like authentication go to the file manager. Disks transfer variable-length objects instead of fixed-size blocks to clients. The File Manager provides a time-limited cachable capability for clients to access the storage objects. A file access from the client to the disks has the following sequence:

  1. The client authenticates itself with the file manager and requests for the file access.
  2. If the client can be granted access to the file requested, the client receives the network location of NASD disks and their capability.
  3. If the client is accessing the disk for the first time, it receives a time-limited key for the establishment of secure communication to the disk.
  4. The file manager informs the corresponding disk using an independent channel.
  5. From now on, the client directly accesses the NASD disks by giving the capability it received and further data transfers go through the network, bypassing the file manager.
gollark: This isn't really "repair"y, inasmuch as you can't fix it if it breaks unless you happen to be really good at reverse engineering.
gollark: Maybe what you mean is banning DRM-ish things, so you can definitely copy the program and run it elsewhere and such?
gollark: Well, you can't actually run the program if you don't have... the program, DRM or no.
gollark: A lot of things now do the fourth.
gollark: If I want to give someone access to some software, I can do MANY things:- give them the binary, which they can run locally but not edit very easily- give them a really obfuscated binary, which would be even harder to edit- give them source code, which is fairly easy to edit (or a somewhat obfuscated form, or without documentation or whatever, but same sort of idea)- not actually give them it at all, and just give them a webservice or something they can use remotely

References
    • NASD: Network Attached Secure Disks
    • Filesystems for Network-Attached Secure Disks Garth Gibson, David F. Nagle*, Khali Amiri*, Fay W. Chang, Howard Gobioff, Erik Riedel*, David Rochberg, and Jim Zelenka, 1997
    • File server scaling with network-attached secure disks Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, archived in Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, Seattle, Washington, United States, Pages: 272 - 284, 1997, ISBN 0-89791-909-2
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