Concerto: A High-concurrency Key-value Store with Integrity

Abstract: The problem of designing a database systems with integrity has been studied for more than two decades. The goal of all this work is to ensure, using cryptographic methods, that unauthorized and potentially malicious users cannot change the state of a database. Traditional approaches employ Merkle trees. Unfortunately, this technique has poor performance; at best on the order of thousands of operations per second. This talk shows how to implement an integrity-protected key-value store that can handle millions of operations per second. One of the key features of this approach, as opposed to any existing approach, is that it supports a high degree of concurrency and allows parallel integrity verification. The approach generalizes to any kind of (SQL) database system, and it can be used to overlay SQL over Blockchains.

Bio: Donald Kossmann is the director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, USA. Before that, he was professor in the Systems Group of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich for 13 years, doing research and teaching all flavors of databases and data management systems. He was chair of ACM SIGMOD from 2013 to 2017 and served on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment from 2005 to 2011. He is a co-founder of four start-ups.