Effective and efficient compromise recovery for weakly consistent replication
Prince Mahajan, Ramakrishna Kotla, Catherine C. Marshall, Venugopalan Ramasubramanian, Thomas L. Rodeheffer, Douglas B. Terry, Ted Wobber · 2009
Weakly consistent replication of data has become increasingly important both for loosely-coupled collections of personal devices and for large-scale infrastructure services. Unfortunately, automatic replication mechanisms are agnostic about the quality of the data they replicate. Inappropriate updates, whether malicious or simply the result of misuse, propagate automatically and quickly. The consequences may not be noticed until days later, when the corrupted data has been fully replicated, thereby deleting or overwriting all traces of the valid data. In this sort of situation, it can be hard or impossible to restore an entire distributed system to a clean state without losing data and disrupting users.