The 13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation seeks to present innovative, exciting research in computer systems. OSDI brings together professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in a premier forum for discussing the design, implementation, and implications of systems software. The OSDI Symposium emphasizes innovative research as well as quantified or insightful experiences in systems design and implementation.

OSDI takes a broad view of the systems area and solicits contributions from many fields of systems practice, including, but not limited to, operating systems, file and storage systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, mobile systems, secure and reliable systems, systems aspects of big data, embedded systems, virtualization, networking as it relates to operating systems, and management and troubleshooting of complex systems. We also welcome work that explores the interface to related areas such as computer architecture, networking, programming languages, analytics, and databases. We particularly encourage contributions containing highly original ideas, new approaches, and/or groundbreaking results. 

Proving the correct execution of concurrent services in zero-knowledge

Authors: 

Srinath Setty, Microsoft Research; Sebastian Angel, University of Pennsylvania; Trinabh Gupta, Microsoft Research and UCSB; Jonathan Lee, Microsoft Research

Abstract: 

This paper introduces Spice, a system for building verifiable state machines (VSMs). A VSM is a request-processing service that produces proofs establishing that requests were executed correctly according to a specification. Such proofs are succinct (a verifier can check them efficiently without reexecution) and zero-knowledge (a verifier learns nothing about the content of the requests, responses, or the internal state of the service). Recent systems for proving the correct execution of stateful computations---Pantry, Geppetto, CTV, vSQL, etc.---implicitly implement VSMs, but they incur prohibitive costs. Spice reduces these costs significantly with a new storage primitive. More notably, Spice’s storage primitive supports multiple writers, making Spice the first system that can succinctly prove the correct execution of concurrent services. We find that Spice running on a cluster of 16 servers achieves 488--1167 transactions/second for a variety of applications including inter-bank transactions, cloud-hosted ledgers, and dark pools. This represents an 18,000--685,000× higher throughput than prior work.

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