EPTL - A Temporal Logic for Weakly Consistent Systems (Short Paper)

Abstract

The high availability and scalability of weakly-consistent systems attracts system designers. Yet, writing correct application code for this type of systems is difficult; even how to specify the intended behavior of such systems is still an open question. There has not been established any standard method to specify the intended dynamic behavior of a weakly consistent system. There exist specifications of various consistency models for distributed and concurrent systems [13,14]; and the semantics of replicated datatypes like CRDTs[14] have been specified in axiomatic and operational models based on visibility relations. In this paper, we present a temporal logic, EPTL, that is tailored to specify properties of weakly consistent systems. In contrast to LTL and CTL, EPTL takes into account that operations of weakly consistent systems are in many cases not serializable and have to be treated respectively to capture the behavior. We embed our temporal logic in Isabelle/HOL and can thereby leverage strong semi-automatic proving capabilities.

ACGreGate: A Framework for Practical Access Control for Applications using Weakly Consistent Databases

“…We have already shown in prior work [19] that correct access control can be established by putting the policy and data state in the same weakly consistent datastore. Our definition of access control is given in [20] and is based on the fact that policy modifications should become active after they have been issued and until the same policy is modified again. This property can be implemented without reverting to strong consistency or establishing global invariants.…”

“…Access Control One important topic of application design is access control. As definition of access control, we follow the definition provided in prior work [20].…”