Abstract
Cloud storage promises unlimited, flexible and cheap storages, including all-time availability and accessibility with the help of various technologies. Free-of-charge offers for endusers allure customers the same way as professional, pay-as-you-go storages do. The delocalization of the data provokes security concerns especially regarding the confidentiality of the data. Even though encryption offers a straight-forward solution to this problem, the performance questions its applicability when it comes to the utilization of professional storage-approaches like iSCSI. In this white-paper, we propose a utilization of NoSQL-based cloud-storages like Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure for iSCSI. We evaluate the costs of a direct, bucket-based encryption and show, that in complex systems like iSCSI, the distance to the cloud represents the bottleneck instead of the encryption. Performance-boosting techniques like prefetching and caching improve the access and result in no practical overhead within such an utilization. Based on our own developed fully Java-based iSCSI target (jSCSI) and jClouds, our prototype represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first, free available, cloud-deployable iSCSI.
BibTeX (Download)
@techreport{Graf2013iSCSI,
title = {Utilizing Cloud Storages for iSCSI: Is Security really expensive?},
author = {Sebastian Graf and Andreas Rain and Daniel Scharon and Marcel Waldvogel},
url = {https://netfuture.ch/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/graf13isci.pdf},
year = {2013},
date = {2013-03-03},
urldate = {1000-01-01},
number = {KN-2013-DiSy-01},
institution = {University of Konstanz, Distributed Systems Laboratory},
abstract = {Cloud storage promises unlimited, flexible and cheap storages, including all-time availability and accessibility with the help of various technologies. Free-of-charge offers for endusers allure customers the same way as professional, pay-as-you-go storages do. The delocalization of the data provokes security concerns especially regarding the confidentiality of the data. Even though encryption offers a straight-forward solution to this problem, the performance questions its applicability when it comes to the utilization of professional storage-approaches like iSCSI. In this white-paper, we propose a utilization of NoSQL-based cloud-storages like Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure for iSCSI. We evaluate the costs of a direct, bucket-based encryption and show, that in complex systems like iSCSI, the distance to the cloud represents the bottleneck instead of the encryption. Performance-boosting techniques like prefetching and caching improve the access and result in no practical overhead within such an utilization. Based on our own developed fully Java-based iSCSI target (jSCSI) and jClouds, our prototype represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first, free available, cloud-deployable iSCSI.},
keywords = {Cloud Storage, Security},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {techreport}
}
