Authentication Infrastructure for Linux kNFSd

Neil Brown

Abstract:

One issue that is important to networking in general and to NFS in particular, but is not addresses particularly well in the Linux kNFSd server, is authentication. The current implementation works fairly well if you have reasonable control of the network, but completely lacks any option for cryptographic authentication, or any obvious way to include such authentication.

This paper discusses the details of authentication in NFS and introduces some modifications to the Linux kNFSd server to help support full authentication.

Note: This paper will also be available after the conference at
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/conf/lca2002/.