This paper describes an efficient and elegant architecture for unifying the meta-data protection of journaling file systems with the data integrity protection of collision-resistant cryptographic hashes. Traditional file system journaling protects the ordering of meta-data operations to maintain consistency in the presence of crashes. However, journaling does not protect important system meta-data and application data from modification or misrepresentation by faulty or malicious storage
Christopher A. Stein, John H. Howard, Margo I. Sel