WriteShield: A pseudo thin-client system for prevention of information leakage

While thin-client systems are diffusing as an effective security method in enterprises and organizations, they still have several issues on usability, operation and cost of introduction. Over the WAN environment, network latency causes slow response of the GUI operation and scarce frame rate for movie playing. In addition, inflexible copy prohibition to the external media interferes with the actual business operations. Server-side system integration causes expensive cost of installation and it raises threshold for the large-scale introduction. In this paper, we propose WriteShield, a pseudo thin-client system which solves above issues. In this system, the local disks are write-protected and the location of data store is restricted to the central file servers. It realizes no data store in local clients as similar to the thin-client system. Since it takes purely the software-based simple approach, it does not require the hardware enhancement of network and servers. The cost of introduction is lower than conventional thin-client systems. This paper presents design and implementation details of WriteShield and evaluates in the perspectives of usability, operation, cost and security. Besides we measure the disk I/O performance to verify its feasibility in the actual environment.