Storage Area Networks Security Protocols and Mechanisms
Harold F. Tipton, Micki Krause · 2007
Storage devices were, up to fairly recently, locked in a glass room and hence the data stored on them was enjoying the privileges of the physical data center security and protection mechanisms. With the development of storage area network (SAN) technology, hard drives and tape drives are not necessarily directly attached to a host anymore but could be rather physically distant-up to several hundred kilometers or even around the globe. Such a flexibility of logically instead of physically attached storage devices to a host made them remotely accessible and highly available; however, it brought into consideration all security elements of the modern network environment, such as privacy, integrity of the data in transit, and authentication of the remotely connected devices. From the data perspective, one can distinguish between storage network security, which refers to protection of the data while it is in transit, versus storage data security, which refers to when the data is stored on tapes or hard drives. This chapter focuses on making information security professionals aware of the new communication protocols and mechanisms for storage network security, explaining threats and their security exposures, as well as describing guidelines for their solutions.