An efficient way to build secure disk

Abstract

Protecting data confidentiality and integrity is important to ensure secure computing. Approach that integrates encryption and hash tree based verification is proposed here to protect disk data. Together with sector-level operation, it can provide protection with characters as online checking, high resistance against attacks, any data protection and unified low-level mechanism. To achieve satisfied performance, it adopts a special structure hash tree, and defines hash sub-trees corresponding to the frequently accessed disk regions as hot-access-windows. Utilizing hot-access-windows, simplifying the layout of tree structure and correctly buffering portion nodes of hash tree, it can reduce the cost of protection sufficiently. At the same time, it is convenient for fast recovery to maintain consistency effectively. Related model, approach and system realization are elaborated, as well as testing results. Theoretical analysis and experimental simulation show that it is a practical and available way to build secure disk. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.