Cobra: Making Transactional Key-Value Stores Verifiably Serializable

Today's cloud databases offer strong properties, including serializability, sometimes called the gold standard database correctness property. But cloud databases are complicated black boxes, running in a different administrative domain from their clients. Thus, clients might like to know whether the databases are meeting their contract. To that end, we introduce COBRA; COBRA applies to transactional key-value stores. It is the first system that combines (a) black-box checking, of (b) serializability, while (c) scaling to real-world online transactional processing workloads. The core technical challenge is that the underlying search problem is computationally expensive. COBRA tames that problem by starting with a suitable SMT solver. COBRA then introduces several new techniques, including a new encoding of the validity condition; hardware acceleration to prune inputs to the solver; and a transaction segmentation mechanism that enables scaling and garbage collection. COBRA imposes modest overhead on clients, improves over baselines by 10 x in verification cost, and (unlike the baselines) supports continuous verification. Our artifact can handle 2000 transactions/sec, equivalent to 170M/day.