Grid technology enables us to share a diversity of computational resources on the Internet. In the grid environment, users often need a convenient method to share data safely in the storages, each of which is separately located across the untrusted public network. However, few existing grid file transfer services balance the trade-off between convenience and security, which leads to the difficulties of dealing with confidential data on the grid. To satisfy such users demand, we have developed a user-oriented and secure filesystem seamlessly integrated to the grid environment.

The filesystem has been developed based on the two technologies. The first is Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) which is provided by Globus Project. GSI is based on PKI, and has the single-sign-on feature. The second is Self-certifying File System (SFS) which is a secure network filesystem developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We combined them to develop a new filesystem, or GSI-SFS.