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Algebraic Replicated Data Types: Programming Secure Local-First Software

Authors Christian Kuessner , Ragnar Mogk , Anna-Katharina Wickert , Mira Mezini

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Author Details

Christian Kuessner
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Ragnar Mogk
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Anna-Katharina Wickert
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Mira Mezini
  • hessian.AI, Darmstadt, Germany
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

Funding

This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research together with the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education (ATHENE), the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative Research Center 1053 MAKI, the LOEWE initiative (Hesse, Germany) within the emergenCITY center, and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) project SafeFBDC (01MK21002K).

Cite As Get BibTex

Christian Kuessner, Ragnar Mogk, Anna-Katharina Wickert, and Mira Mezini. Algebraic Replicated Data Types: Programming Secure Local-First Software. In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 14:1-14:33, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.14

Abstract

This paper is about programming support for local-first applications that manage private data locally, but still synchronize data between multiple devices. Typical use cases are synchronizing settings and data, and collaboration between multiple users. Such applications must preserve the privacy and integrity of the user’s data without impeding or interrupting the user’s normal workflow - even when the device is offline or has a flaky network connection.
From the programming perspective, availability along with privacy and security concerns pose significant challenges, for which developers have to learn and use specialized solutions such as conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) or APIs for centralized data stores. This work relieves developers from this complexity by enabling the direct and automatic use of algebraic data types - which developers already use to express the business logic of the application - for synchronization and collaboration. Moreover, we use this approach to provide end-to-end encryption and authentication between multiple replicas (using a shared secret), that is suitable for a coordination-free setting. Overall, our approach combines all the following advantages: it (1) allows developers to design custom data types, (2) provides data privacy and integrity when using untrusted intermediaries, (3) is coordination free, (4) guarantees eventual consistency by construction (i.e., independent of developer errors), (5) does not cause indefinite growth of metadata, (6) has sufficiently efficient implementations for the local-first setting.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Information systems → Data management systems
  • Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
  • Security and privacy → Cryptography
Keywords
  • local-first
  • data privacy
  • coordination freedom
  • CRDTs
  • AEAD

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