Security Enhancement and Performance Evaluation of an Object-Based Storage System

Object-based storage offloads some works of file systems to storage devices to improve security, scalability, and performance. Security is a main concern when sharing data over network. We examine the security model of object-based storage and find that there is some problem in the model. It can be disabled by modifying specific field in the command. We propose a solution to this problem by encryption that makes unauthenticated clients impossible to alter the field. The overhead of this encryption is quite low. Thus the performance of our enhanced object-based storage system is comparable to that of the original one while offering an enhanced security. In addition, we have compared the performance of OSD systems with that of iSCSI and NFS. The write performance of an object-based storage system is much better because it can offload some tasks to storage devices, and the CPU usage at client side is also largely reduced.