Attribute-Based Encryption and Its Application to a Software-Distributed Shared Memory

Due to the widespread of cloud computing, there is an increasing interest in distributed systems as well as in data privacy and security. However, unlike the multi-core processors and NUMA architectures, the Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) systems do not benefit from the numerous works on security and privacy. We argue here that their potential deployment onto distributed heterogeneous systems requires new approaches to securely manage access to shared data. In this paper we propose to rely on the Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) techniques to tackle the problem of data security within the Software DSM. Moreover, this approach allowing to directly store encrypted data within the DSM and to manage the access control to these data is made transparent for the user. The implementation over an in-house S-DSM using libbswabe, an ABE library, shows that, as expected, the overhead is significant, but that it can also be adapted to the application requirements as a trade-off between security and performance.