Overview

As most of today’s data lives in the cloud, security is crucial because the cloud databases are run by potentially malicious third parties. For many applications, integrity of the data and of the operations on the data are important, if not more than data secrecy. A verifiable database system ensures that a user is given a strong integrity guarantee, that is, the operation is executed correctly over untampered data. While general-purpose verifiable computation techniques do exist, they involve heavy use of expensive cryptographic primitives, therefore suffering from poor performance and cannot be used for practical database applications. A practical verifiable database system must make trade-offs between security, performance, and functionalities.

This workshop brings together researchers and engineers from academia and industry to discuss ideas and techniques for practical verifiable database systems. The recent success of blockchains offers exciting opportunities, which have led to several commercial systems such as Amazon QLDB, Alibaba’s LedgerDB, and Azure SQLLedger. At the same time, the poor performance of existing blockchains presents a major challenge for building practical systems. We hope this workshop will identify new abstractions, systems, challenges, and solutions that improve state-of-the-art verifiable database systems.

Workshop PC Chairs