A secure disk system: Using file system level knowledge for disk data protection

When the system is attacked and the privilege of the administrator is gained by the intruder, some important system files may be tampered with or destroyed. In this paper, we propose a secure disk system called SecDisk, which is embedded in a disk and utilizes the knowledge of how the file system above is using the disk to protect on-disk data from intrusions. When the host system violates the access rules for the data, the administrator will be notified and the original data can be backed up by the disk. This is beneficial since it can protect important data even when the host system is compromised. According to the experimental results, the overhead is acceptable during normal operation.