With Stateless, the NFS protocol carries all the information needed to locate the appropriate file and perform the requested operation. Similarly, it does not track which clients have the exported volumes mounted, again assuming that if a request comes in, it must be legitimate.

• While this stateless approach makes NFS resilient and rather easy to implement, it also makes it unsecure.
• For example, forged read or write requests could be allowed by an NFS server.

These issues are addressed in the industry standard NFS Version 4, in which NFS is made stateful to improve its security, performance, and functionality.