Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS

Mohammed Yousif; Wael Hadeed; Nagham Sultan

doi:10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660

Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS

Abstract

In today’s cloud computing environments, large-scale data infrastructures like Hadoop are facing severe challenges in providing efficient and secure static storage; these challenges stem from limitations in single algorithm encryption schemes as well as metadata management instability. This paper proposes a co-designed architecture demonstrating that metadata consistency and high-throughput encryption can be achieved simultaneously without performance trade-offs. Our approach integrates two components: (1) a Raft-consistent metadata service (RCMS) that replaces the single-point-of-failure NameNode with distributed consensus-based replication. Empirical evaluation shows that RCMS has a metadata fail-over latency of 1.35(+-0.42) seconds - an improvement of 78 times over ZooKeeper-based HA (105(+-28) seconds). Such fast recovery is essential for metadata-sensitive applications such as real-time analytics, streaming applications, and interactive SQL engines. Concomitantly, GHEM provides the encryption throughput of 935 MB/s, which is 51% uplift from CPU-based HDFS-TDE’s throughput of 620 MB/s. 8.1 times faster compared to 10 GB files. The key to achieving this architecture is that RCMS and GHEM are executed in non-overlapping critical paths and that metadata transactions and data encryption are performed in parallel with the network I/O, with a total overhead of less than 1%, given all together. This co-design confronts this entrenched notion that strong consistency forces performance compromises. Experimental validation for a four-node prototype cluster validates both the fast fail-over of metadata and the high-throughput encryption facilities. Finally, the proposed framework is easily extendable to various types of distributed storage systems, including Ceph, Cassandra, and cloud object storage, which makes this framework a solid foundation for building secure, consistent, and high-performance data storage solutions.

Keywords

Ethical Statement

It is declared that during the preparation process of this study, scientific and ethical principles were followed, and all the studies benefited from are stated in the bibliography.

Thanks

We would like to acknowledge the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, College of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Mosul, for kindly providing the facility for the research.

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Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Cloud Computing Security

Journal Section

Research Article

Authors

Mohammed Yousif ^*
0009-0001-4646-0796
Iraq

Wael Hadeed
0000-0002-3695-8021
Iraq

Nagham Sultan
0000-0003-2166-0131
Iraq

Publication Date

September 30, 2026

Submission Date

August 2, 2025

Acceptance Date

January 24, 2026

Published in Issue

Year 2026 Volume: 9 Number: 4

DOI

https://doi.org/10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660

IZ

https://izlik.org/JA43NW56YE

Cite

RIS / Bibtex

APA

Yousif, M., Hadeed, W., & Sultan, N. (2026). Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS. Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences, 9(4), 1012-1025. https://doi.org/10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660

AMA

1.Yousif M, Hadeed W, Sultan N. Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS. SAUCIS. 2026;9(4):1012-1025. doi:10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660

Chicago

Yousif, Mohammed, Wael Hadeed, and Nagham Sultan. 2026. “Raft-Consistent Metadata With GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS”. Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences 9 (4): 1012-25. https://doi.org/10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660.

EndNote

Yousif M, Hadeed W, Sultan N (September 1, 2026) Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS. Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences 9 4 1012–1025.

IEEE

[1]M. Yousif, W. Hadeed, and N. Sultan, “Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS”, SAUCIS, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 1012–1025, Sept. 2026, doi: 10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660.

ISNAD

Yousif, Mohammed - Hadeed, Wael - Sultan, Nagham. “Raft-Consistent Metadata With GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS”. Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences 9/4 (September 1, 2026): 1012-1025. https://doi.org/10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660.

JAMA

1.Yousif M, Hadeed W, Sultan N. Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS. SAUCIS. 2026;9:1012–1025.

MLA

Yousif, Mohammed, et al. “Raft-Consistent Metadata With GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS”. Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences, vol. 9, no. 4, Sept. 2026, pp. 1012-25, doi:10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660.

Vancouver

1.Mohammed Yousif, Wael Hadeed, Nagham Sultan. Raft-Consistent Metadata with GPU-Accelerated Encryption for Secure HDFS. SAUCIS. 2026 Sep. 1;9(4):1012-25. doi:10.35377/saucis.9.106882.1756660