The paper “ASPAS: As Secure as Possible Available Systems“, co-written by Houssam Yactine, Ali Shoker, and George Younes, researchers at INESC TEC’s Trusted Software Lab (HASLab), and students of the PhD Programme in Computer Science (MAP-i), received the Best Paper Award at the 16th edition of the International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques (DisCoTec2021).

The results of this research can be applied, for example, to social networks, in status updates such as the number of likes or comments, or to other online services such as shopping cart management in e-commerce or even in collaborative online document editing.

Specifically, the innovation is based on the combination of an optimistic approach in the execution of operations, thus allowing a fast response to customers’ requests, with the use of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), which allow delegating the process to a later stage and thus ensuring that the system remains coherent. While the existing solutions based on CRDTs do not guarantee a correct operation in the face of the possibility of malicious behaviour of any of the servers, the ASPAS system guarantees the coherence of the system and a low response latency, if the ratio between malicious and honest servers is below the defined limit, thus being more applicable in practice.

The DisCoTec 2021 conference is a major event sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and the 2021 edition brought together three main conferences: COORDINATION 2021, DAIS 2021 and FORTE 2021.

The researchers from INESC TEC’s High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) mentioned in the news are students of the PhD Program in Computer Science (MAP-i) of EEUM, and have links to INESC TEC and VORTEX Colab.