ICDT 2021 : The Sixteenth International Conference on Digital Telecommunications Remote Filesystem Event Notification and Processing for Distributed Systems Kushal Thapa†‡, Vinay Lokesh*#, Stan McClellan†§ †Ingram School of Engineering *Dept. of Computer Science Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA e-mail: ‡
[email protected], #
[email protected], §
[email protected] Abstract— Monitoring and safeguarding the integrity of files networking solutions and architectures allow the users to in local filesystems is imperative to computer systems for many circumvent certain firewall restrictions, thus increasing purposes, including system security, data acquisition, and other complexity while introducing security risks. Here, we leverage processing requirements. However, distributed systems may the well-known network architecture where an Internet- have difficulty in monitoring remote filesystem events even reachable system acts as a middleman to establish a secure, though asynchronous notification of filesystem events on a bidirectional network connection between firewalled devices. remote, resource-constrained device can be very useful. This This approach is not new, however, comprehensive analysis paper discusses several aspects of monitoring remote filesystem of various parameters is difficult to obtain, so we provide some events in a loosely-coupled and distributed architecture. This results and discussion regarding the various configuration paper investigates a simple and scalable technique to enable secure remote file system monitoring using existing Operating options and performance of this architecture. System resident tools with minimum overhead. In Section II of this paper, we describe various tools that are generally used to monitor local filesystem events. We also Keywords— Secure Remote Filesystem Monitoring; Firewall; briefly discuss about Secure Shell Protocol Filesystem Distributed Architecture; Secure Network Communication; SSH; (SSHFS) [9] and Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) [12].