Events

This talk discusses the challenges of building robust “fault-tolerant cores”, the root-of-trust component that underpins any large-scale deployment. Fault tolerance has three pillars: performance, usability, and modeling faults in the “right” way. Professor Natacha Crooks from UC Berkeley will focus on performance/usability in this talk and on tamper-proof shared logs.

Tamper-proof shared logs are increasingly being used in industry to guarantee strong integrity protection and high availability. They spread trust across multiple administrative domains, and rely on the fact that it is unlikely that all parties will be simultaneously compromised. Such logs have been used, among others, for applications like code transparency at Microsoft, key recovery for encrypted messaging at Signal, decentralized identity management, multi-party data sharing, and cryptocurrencies. These logs are utilized as “root-of-trust systems”: they record a small amount of highly sensitive state, such as secret keys, serving as the root of trust for a much larger application. Current log implementations, unfortunately, are hard to scale and offer a limited API. Distributed databases already scalably implement the *abstraction* of a shared log through serializable transactions; they also already provide a rich API through SQL. Tamper-proof shared logs need be no different.