Towards a Virtual Domain Based Authentication on MapReduce

This paper has proposed a novel authentication solution for the MapReduce (MR) model, a new distributed and parallel computing paradigm commonly deployed to process Big Data by major IT players, such as Facebook and Yahoo. It identifies a set of security, performance, and scalability requirements that are specified from a comprehensive study of a job execution process using MR and security threats and attacks in this environment. Based on the requirements, it critically analyzes the state-of-the-art authentication solutions, discovering that the authentication services currently proposed for the MR model is not adequate. This paper then presents a novel layered authentication solution for the MR model and describes the core components of this solution, which includes the virtual domain based authentication framework (VDAF). These novel ideas are significant, because, first, the approach embeds the characteristics of MR-in-cloud deployments into security solution designs, and this will allow the MR model be delivered as a software as a service in a public cloud environment along with our proposed authentication solution; second, VDAF supports the authentication of every interactions by any MR components involved in a job execution flow, so long as the interactions are for accessing resources of the job; third, this continuous authentication service is provided in such a manner that the costs incurred in providing the authentication service should be as low as possible.