Security vs Performance: Tradeoffs using a Trust Framework

Abstract

We present an architecture of a trust framework that can be utilized to intelligently tradeoff between security and performance in a SAN file system. The primary idea is to differentiate between various clients in the system based on their trustworthiness and provide them with different levels of security/performance. Client trustworthiness is evaluated dynamically using a customizable trust model by online monitoring of the client's behavior. We also describe the interface of the trust framework with a block level security solution for an out-of-band virtualization based SAN file system (SAN FS). The proposed framework can also be easily extended to provide differential treatment based on data sensitivity, using a configurable parameter of the trust model.