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Litmus: A Cryptographically-Verified Database System

ECE Distinguished Lectures Seminar

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Location: EER 1.516
Speaker:
Srini Devadas
MIT

Existing secure database management systems (DBMSes) focus on security and privacy of data but overlook semantic properties, such as the correctness and ACID properties of transactions. Enforcing these properties is crucial to the functionality of applications. If these guarantees do not hold, catastrophic losses could result.

To address this issue, we present Litmus, a DBMS that can provide verifiable proofs of transaction correctness and semantic properties including atomicity and serializability. Litmus features a co-design of both the database and the cryptographic parts. We evaluate a proof-of-concept prototype of Litmus show that under reasonable cryptographic assumptions it can process more than 15,000 transactions per second (txn/s) verifiably. The proof is no larger than 30kB per verification batch and verifies with a constant time of 200 seconds.

Joint work with Yu Xia (MIT), Xiangyao Yu (Wisconsin-Madison) and Andy Pavlo (CMU)

 

Srini
Srini Devadas is an Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His current research interests are primarily in the areas of applied cryptography, computer security and computer architecture.

 

Lunch will be included.