Systems and Networking - Basil: Breaking up BFT with ACID (transactions)

This talk will present Basil, a new transactional Byzantine Fault Tolerant database. Basil leverages ACID transactions to scalably implement the abstraction of a trusted shared log in the presence of Byzantine actors. Unlike traditional BFT approaches, Basil executes non-conflicting operations in parallel and commits transactions in a single round-trip during fault-free executions. This approach improves throughput over traditional BFT systems by four to five times. Basil’s novel recovery mechanism further minimizes the impact of failures: with 30% Byzantine clients, throughput drops by less than 25% in the worst-case.

Bio: Natacha Crooks is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. She works at the intersection of distributed systems and databases. Most recently, she is focused on developing scalable systems with strong integrity and privacy guarantees. She is a recipient of a VMWare Early Career Faculty Grant, the Dennis Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award.