ABSTRACT
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.
