A token-based authentication security scheme for Hadoop distributed file system using elliptic curve cryptography

In recent years, a number of platforms for building Big Data applications, both open-source and proprietary, have been proposed. One of the most popular platforms is Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework for Big Data processing used by leading companies like Yahoo and Facebook. Historically, earlier versions of Hadoop did not prioritize security, so Hadoop has continued to make security modifications. In particular, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) upon which Hadoop modules are built did not provide robust security for user authentication. This paper proposes a token-based authentication scheme that protects sensitive data stored in HDFS against replay and impersonation attacks. The proposed scheme allows HDFS clients to be authenticated by the datanode via the block access token. Unlike most HDFS authentication protocols adopting public key exchange approaches, the proposed scheme uses the hash chain of keys. The proposed scheme has the performance (communication power, computing power and area efficiency) as good as that of existing HDFS systems.