Secure file allocation and caching in large-scale distributed systems

In this paper, we present a file allocation and caching scheme that guarantees high assurance, availability, and load balancing in a large-scale distributed file system that can support dynamic updates of authorization policies. The scheme uses fragmentation and replication to store files with high security requirements in a system composed of a majority of low-security servers. We develop mechanisms to fragment files, to allocate them into multiple servers, and to cache them as close as possible to their readers while preserving the security requirement of the files, providing load-balancing, and reducing delay of read operations. The system offers a trade-off between performance and security that is dynamically tunable according to the current level of threat. We validate our mechanisms with extensive simulations in an Internet-like network.