Authenticated Key Exchange Protocols for Parallel Network File Systems

Abstract

The problem is motivated by the proliferation of large-scale distributed file systems supporting parallel
access to more than one storage devices i.e. to the multiple devices. Our work mainly focuses on the current Internet
standard for such file systems, i.e. the parallel Network File System. This makes use of Kerberos for establishing the
parallel session keys between the clients and the storage devices. Our analysis about the existing Kerberos-based
protocol displays that it has a number of limitations. In this paper, we are trying to propose a variety of authenticated
key exchange protocols which are designed to address the issues which were faced by the existing system. We show that
our protocols are efficient to handle the reducing up to approximately of the workload of the metadata server and
concurrently supporting forward secrecy and escrow-freeness. Only a small fraction of increased computation overhead
at the client is what all required.