Computer Science Seminar
Date: Tuesday, 12 September 2023
Time: 2:00 PM
Venue : Lecture hall 5
Flow-Limited Authorization for Quorum Replication
Priyanka Mandal
University of California, Santa Cruz.
12-09-23

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Abstract

Availability is crucial to the security of distributed systems, but guaranteeing availability is hard, especially when participants in the system may act maliciously. Quorum replication protocols provide both integrity and availability: same computation is replicated at multiple independent hosts, and a quorum of these hosts must agree on the output of all operations applied to the data. Unfortunately, these protocols have high overhead and can be difficult to calibrate for a specific application's needs. Ideally, developers could use high-level abstractions for consensus and replication to write fault-tolerant code that is secure by construction. I will present Flow-Limited Authorization for Quorum Replication (FLAQR), a core calculus for building distributed applications with quorum replication protocols, that enforces end-to-end information security using information flow control policies.