One important portion of security is authentication, for any access control policy is useless if it cannot be determined who is requesting permission to a file. Thus, some mechanism must be in place to authenticate users before file system access is granted. In general,
Authentication is nothing more nor less than the determination by the authorized receiver(s), and perhaps the arbiter(s), that a particular message was most probably sent by the authorized transmitter under the existing authentication protocol and that it hasn't subsequently been altered or substituted for [13].
Below, we explore authentication as it is used in traditional network file systems and discuss our implementation of an authentication protocol for JNFS.