Dike : Virtualization-aware Access Control for Multitenant Filesystems

In a virtualization environment that serves multiple customers (or tenants), storage consolidation at the filesystem level is desirable because it enables data sharing, administration efficiency, and performance optimization. Today the scalable deployment of filesystems in such environments is challenging due to intermediate translation layers required for purposes of networked file access or identity management. First we analyze the security requirements in multitenant filesystems. Then we introduce the Dike authorization architecture, which combines native access control with tenant namespace isolation that is backwards compatible to object-based filesystems. We experimentally evaluate a prototype implementation that we developed, and show that our solution incurs limited added performance overhead.