A decentralized access control mechanism using authorization certificate for distributed file systems

Scalability and high availability are essential features when considering security as a foundation of cloud computing. However, existing centralized access control mechanisms are unable to satisfy these requirements. Here we propose a decentralized access control mechanism based on authorization certificates. We describe a method to decentralize the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) and a method to improve access control performance. We show evaluation results for the availability and scalability of our proposed mechanism through simulation and prototype implementation.