Using NFS to implement role-based access control

Presents a design for a modified NFS (Network File System) server that, through simple additions, makes it possible to place an exported file system under role-based access control (RBAC). RBAC is an efficient way for managing access control information. However, most access control systems today do not support RBAC. As a solution to this problem, the modified NFS server we present in this paper makes it possible to introduce RBAC into existing environments in a transparent manner. We have implemented our design as an extension to the Linux User Space NFS Server running on a Linux 2.0 system. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility of our main idea. However, tests show that performance of our server needs to be improved, something we believe can be achieved through code optimizations.