On asynchronous enforcement of security policies in 'Nomadic' storage facilities

The fast advance in networked and ubiquitous computing leads to remarkable innovation also in data storage technologies. The classical local/remote storage dichotomy has been enriched due the introduction of new hardware and networking technologies such as plenty of different kinds of solid-state storage devices (e.g., USB pen drives) as well as several advanced distributed serverless storage facilities such as peer-to-peer file sharing networks and cloud-based storage services (SaaS). Such sample technologies can be considered as the endpoints of a wide range of storage facilities that, although characterized by important technological differences, share several crucial security issues. Indeed, such kind of storage, (here referred to as 'nomadic') could undermine data security and privacy within large organizations even if they adopt strong security policies. This paper faces the problem of enforcing security policies within a security domain whose nodes are not permanently connected each other, mainly concerning of the protection of data stored on nomadic data stores. The authors survey some solutions available in literature that could potentially fit this scenario with the aim of defining a framework to secure such storage facilities in terms of file system engineering. To this end, two practical scenarios leveraging on nomadic storage facilities are discussed: (1)the deployment of USB storage devices to asynchronously share sensitive data, and (2) facing assurance requirements in managing large projects conducted by cooperating independent communities of software developers (such as the so called Open Source Community) by means of Distributed Revision Control Systems. © 2013 IEEE