2026-07-24T21:22:25Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:18207 2024-03-06T11:01:22Z ddc:004 open_access

Algebraic Replicated Data Types: Programming Secure Local-First Software Kuessner, Christian Mogk, Ragnar Wickert, Anna-Katharina Mezini, Mira local-first data privacy coordination freedom CRDTs AEAD 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Christian Kuessner and Ragnar Mogk and Anna-Katharina Wickert and Mira Mezini 2023 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 263, 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.14 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-182076 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.14 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode