2.3DBApr 19, 2023
GeoGauss: Strongly Consistent and Light-Coordinated OLTP for Geo-Replicated SQL DatabaseWeixing Zhou, Qi Peng, Zijie Zhang et al.
Multinational enterprises conduct global business that has a demand for geo-distributed transactional databases. Existing state-of-the-art databases adopt a sharded master-follower replication architecture. However, the single-master serving mode incurs massive cross-region writes from clients, and the sharded architecture requires multiple round-trip acknowledgments (e.g., 2PC) to ensure atomicity for cross-shard transactions. These limitations drive us to seek yet another design choice. In this paper, we propose a strongly consistent OLTP database GeoGauss with full replica multi-master architecture. To efficiently merge the updates from different master nodes, we propose a multi-master OCC that unifies data replication and concurrent transaction processing. By leveraging an epoch-based delta state merge rule and the optimistic asynchronous execution, GeoGauss ensures strong consistency with light-coordinated protocol and allows more concurrency with weak isolation, which are sufficient to meet our needs. Our geo-distributed experimental results show that GeoGauss achieves 7.06X higher throughput and 17.41X lower latency than the state-of-the-art geo-distributed database CockroachDB on the TPC-C benchmark.
9.0PLJun 19
AI-Assisted Completion of CertiGC Proofs: An Experience ReportShengyi Wang
This experience report describes the Codex-assisted completion and stabilization of a substantial Rocq (formerly Coq) proof development for CertiGC, the verified generational garbage collector in the CertiGraph project. The development extends the collector from an effectively immutable setting to a mutable one by adding remembered-set forwarding to the collection path and re-establishing the top-level graph-isomorphism correctness theorem. The central technical issue was not low-level proof scripting alone: mutable updates invalidate the old global no-backward-edge assumption, so the proof had to be reorganized around a recorded-backward-edge invariant stating that every backward edge is recorded in the appropriate remembered-set component. This case differs from recent AI-assisted formal-proof accounts: unlike the adaptation of a nearby compilerproof architecture or a fresh metatheory formalization, it completes a long-running verification in a mature codebase built on the Verified Software Toolchain (VST) and CertiGraph, both mechanized in Rocq. The Rocq kernel remained the arbiter of correctness, while our role shifted toward adjudicating invariant proposals, constraining specification changes, reviewing theorem statements, and deciding when proof cleanup was justified. The Codex-assisted phase repaired the VST relation proofs first, then restored the mathematical graph-isomorphism theorem, and only then audited the premise path from the VST specification to the theorem. That audit found and removed a stale no-backward-edge condition from the VST-facing proof path. This report presents the workflow, resulting proof artifact, and lessons for agentic proof maintenance.
12.4CRJul 2, 2018
BesFS: A POSIX Filesystem for Enclaves with a Mechanized Safety ProofShweta Shinde, Shengyi Wang, Pinghai Yuan et al.
New trusted computing primitives such as Intel SGX have shown the feasibility of running user-level applications in enclaves on a commodity trusted processor without trusting a large OS. However, the OS can still compromise the integrity of an enclave by tampering with the system call return values. In fact, it has been shown that a subclass of these attacks, called Iago attacks, enables arbitrary logic execution in enclave programs. Existing enclave systems have very large TCB and they implement ad-hoc checks at the system call interface which are hard to verify for completeness. To this end, we present BesFS--the first filesystem interface which provably protects the enclave integrity against a completely malicious OS. We prove 167 lemmas and 2 key theorems in 4625 lines of Coq proof scripts, which directly proves the safety properties of the BesFS specification. BesFS comprises of 15 APIs with compositional safety and is expressive enough to support 31 real applications we test. BesFS integrates into existing SGX-enabled applications with minimal impact to TCB. BesFS can serve as a reference implementation for hand-coded API checks.