History-Independent Concurrent Objects

Hagit Attiya, Michael A. Bender, Martín Farach-Colton, Rotem Oshman, Noa Schiller

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

A data structure is called history independent if its internal memory representation does not reveal the history of operations applied to it, only its current state. In this paper we study history independence for concurrent data structures, and establish foundational possibility and impossibility results. We show that a large class of concurrent objects cannot be implemented from smaller base objects in a manner that is both wait-free and history independent; but if we settle for either lock-freedom instead of wait-freedom or for a weak notion of history independence, then at least one object in the class, multi-valued single-reader single-writer registers, can be implemented from smaller base objects, binary registers.On the other hand, using large base objects, we give a strong possibility result in the form of a universal construction: an object with s possible states can be implemented in a wait-free, history-independent manner from compare-and-swap base objects that each have O(s + 2n) possible memory states, where n is the number of processes in the system.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPODC 2024 - Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Pages14-24
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798400706684
DOIs
StatePublished - 17 Jun 2024
Event43rd ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2024 - Nantes, France
Duration: 17 Jun 202421 Jun 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Conference

Conference43rd ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2024
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityNantes
Period17/06/2421/06/24

Keywords

  • multi-valued register
  • queue
  • state-quiescent history independence
  • universal implementation

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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