IBE Applied to Identity Authentication for Object-Based Storage System

Object-based storage system (OBSS) has tens of thousands of users and stores a large number of sensitive data. its security has received a great deal of attentions Before accessing the storage devices, the clients have to acquire an authorization from the metadata servers. Existing credential-based authentication (CBA) model, which has been widely used for large high-performance storage systems, has unavoidable disadvantages, such as the system must generate a large number of credentials and maintain a huge key hierarchy. Identity-based encryption (IBE) is an emerging scheme to enhance the system security, this paper concentrated on the design and implementation of IBE for the identity authentication in the OBSS. We describe the detailed process of the identity-based authentication (IBA) scheme on the MDS, and incorporate it into a real OBSS to evaluate the efficiency of IBA. The experimental results show that IBA accounts for only about 60% overhead of the CBA.