Toward securing untrusted storage without public-key operations

Adding security capabilities to shared, remote and untrusted storage file systems leads to performance degradation that limits their use. Public-key cryptographic primitives, widely used in such file systems, are known to have worse performance than their symmetric key counterparts. In this paper we examine design alternatives that avoid public-key cryptography operations to achieve better performance. We present the trade-offs and limitations that are introduced by these substitutions. Copyright 2005 ACM.