Key exchange authentication protocol for NFS enabled HDFS client

By virtue of its built-in processing capabilities for large datasets, Hadoop ecosystem has been utilized to solve many critical problems. The ecosystem consists of three components; client, Namenode and Datanode, where client is a user component that requests cluster operations through Namenode and processes data blocks at Datanode enabled with Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Recently, HDFS has launched an add-on to connect a client through Network File System (NFS) that can upload and download set of data blocks over Hadoop cluster. In this way, a client is not considered as part of the HDFS and could perform read and write operations through a contrast file system. This HDFS NFS gateway has raised many security concerns, most particularly; no reliable authentication support of upload and download of data blocks, no local and remote client efficient connectivity, and HDFS mounting durability issues through untrusted connectivity. To stabilize the NFS gateway strategy, we present in this paper a Key Exchange Authentication Protocol (KEAP) between NFS enabled client and HDFS NFS gateway. The proposed approach provides cryptographic assurance of authentication between clients and gateway. The protocol empowers local and remote client to reduce the problem of session lagging over server instances. Moreover, KEAP-NFS enabled client increases durability through stabilized session and increases ordered writes through HDFS trusted authorization. The experimental evaluation depicts that KEAP-NFS enabled client increases local and remote client I/O stability, increases durability of HDFS mount, and manages ordered and unordered writes over HDFS Hadoop cluster.