| Storage security has emerged as a critical area of research in the last decade. Given the rise of sensitive digital data such as online medical records, financial data, corporate tax records etc, several mechanisms have been sought for and proposed to alleviate the security concerns associated with data at rest and in transit. Further, data privacy concerns have increased with the advent of networked storage models which have been adopted for the tremendous benefits offered by data consolidation. In addition, storage outsourcing industry has grown in the last decade and companies are increasingly relying on external organizations to store critical data. Consequences of security breaches can have far reaching consequences, over and beyond the cost of detecting and investigating such breaches.;On the other hand, performance overheads and lack of efficient techniques to bound them have both been serious deterrents to the widespread adoption of security in storage systems. Applications are becoming more data intensive, requiring large storage capacities, high I/O bandwidth and low latency access to storage. The growing disparity between processing speeds and I/O performance continues to impose stringent requirements on storage systems. Further, applications are now more collaborative, with sharing of data sets becoming prevalent not just between users/applications of a single organization, but across organizations as well placing even higher performance requirements on the storage system. The motivation for this dissertation is driven by the need to secure storage systems which cater to the performance demands of applications. |
