VeriTxn: Verifiable Transactions for Cloud-Native Databases with Storage Disaggregation

Cloud-native databases become increasingly popular while exposing to greater data security and correctness risks. Existing verifiable outsourced databases overlook either the correctness risk of transactions, or the disaggregation architecture: a key design consideration of cloud-native databases for performance and elasticity, or both. We present VeriTxn, a novel cloud-native database that efficiently provides verifiability of transaction correctness. VeriTxn relies on the trusted hardware (i.e., Intel SGX) to enable verifiable transaction processing. We build a page-structure cache in the trusted domain, where transactions can be verified with low, constant overhead. VeriTxn further optimizes the read-only transactions by exploiting disaggregation to fit the read-heavy workload in the cloud. We also integrate our proposal into MySQL, a popular open-source database. We conduct extensive experiments to compare VeriTxn against state-of-the-art verifiable databases and evaluate the performance of VeriTxn on MySQL. The results show that VeriTxn introduces tolerable performance degradation for verifiable transactions, while achieving up to 7.03× and 7.93× higher throughput than Litmus and LedgerDB, and its sustainable performance when integrated with MySQL.