MS Thesis defense
Dynamically Reconfigurable Layered Filesystem
Sunil Venkatesh
10:00am Thursday, 26 July 2012, ITE 325b
Traditionally, all files and directories in Linux and UNIX-like systems have been organized in a hierarchical fashion under the root directory “/” adhering to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Although there is sufficient flexibility in how the filesystem hierarchy is structured given it satisfies the FHS, there is little straightforward means to customize the filesystem structure to suit an individual user’s or a set of users’ needs without affecting rest of the users on a shared system. Our approach aims to eliminate such a restriction by providing isolated environments to individual users with the help of data being organized in the form of layers. Such an environment also provides an important advantage from security perspective by reducing the risk involved in unwarranted access to files by carefully choosing the layers a user has access. Maintainability at the layer level is another key advantage of our approach over the fine-grained approach of dealing with individual files.
Committee: Drs. John Dorband (Chair), Yelena Yesha, Mohamed Younis