In databases and transaction processing, two-phase locking (2PL) is a concurrency control method that guarantees serializability. It is also the name of the resulting set of database transaction schedules (histories). The protocol uses locks, applied by a transaction to data, which may block (interpreted as signals to stop) other transactions from accessing the same data during the transaction's life. By the 2PL protocol, locks are applied and removed in two phases:

Expanding phase: locks are acquired and no locks are released.

Shrinking phase: locks are released and no locks are acquired.

Two types of locks are used by the basic protocol: Shared and Exclusive locks. Refinements of the basic protocol may use more lock types. Using locks that block processes, 2PL may be subject to deadlocks that result from the mutual blocking of two or more transactions. Data-access locks A lock is a system object associated with a shared resource such as a data item of an elementary ty

A Petri Net Model for FDDI

Nicoleta Sergent

Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) is a high speed local area network operating at 100Mbps using a fiber optic ring transmission medium. The purpose of this paper is to build a Petri net model for the FDDI media access control (MAC) protocol. This model is hierarchically integrated into the Petri net model of the two-phase commitment (2PC) algorithm. By simulating the composed Petri net model we evaluate the latency of the 2PC algorithm. The FDDI model is validated by comparing the data obtained from performance measures and the numerical results derived from simulation.

1997

Model checking transactional memories

Rachid Guerraoui, Vasu Singh

Model checking transactional memories (TMs) is difficult because of the unbounded number, length, and delay of concurrent transactions, as well as the unbounded size of the memory. We show that, under certain conditions satisfied by most TMs we know of, the model checking problem can be reduced to a finite-state problem, and we illustrate the use of the method by proving the correctness of several TMs, including two-phase locking, DSTM, and TL2. The safety properties we consider include strict serializability and opacity; the liveness properties include obstruction freedom, livelock freedom, and wait freedom. Our main contribution lies in the structure of the proofs, which are largely automated and not restricted to the TMs mentioned above. In a first step we show that every TM that enjoys certain structural properties either violates a requirement on some program with two threads and two shared variables, or satisfies the requirement on all programs. In the second step, we use a model checker to prove the requirement for the TM applied to a most general program with two threads and two variables. In the safety case, the model checker checks language inclusion between two finite-state transition systems, a nondeterministic transition system representing the given TM applied to a most general program, and a deterministic transition system representing a most liberal safe TM applied to the same program. The given TM transition system is nondeterministic because a TM can be used with different contention managers, which resolve conflicts differently. In the liveness case, the model checker analyzes fairness conditions on the given TM transition system.

Springer Verlag2010

Secure Communication in Erasure Networks with State-feedback

László Czap

The security and efficiency of communication are two of the main concerns for networks of today and the future. Our understanding of how to efficiently send information over various channels and networks has significantly increased in the past decade (see e.g., [1–3]), whereas our understanding of how to securely send information has not yet reached the same level. In this thesis, we advance the theory of secure communication by deriving capacity results and by developing coding schemes that provide information-theoretic security for erasure networks. We characterize the highest achievable secret-message rate in the presence of an eavesdropping adversary in various settings, where communication takes place over erasure channels with state-feedback. Our results provide such a characterization for a point-to-point erasure channel, for a broadcast erasure channel with multiple receivers, for a network with multiple parallel channels, a V-network and for a triangle network. We introduce several two-phase secure coding schemes that consist of a key generation phase and an encrypted message sending phase. Our schemes leverage several resources for security: channel erasures, feedback, common randomness and the topology of the network. We present coding schemes for all the above mentioned settings as well as for erasure networks with arbitrary topology. In all the cases where we provide exact characterization, a two-phase scheme achieves the secret-message capacity. All our proposed coding schemes use only linear operations and thus can serve as a basis for practical code designs. For networks, we develop a linear programming framework for describing secure coding schemes and for deriving new outer bounds. We use linear programs to describe our schemes and to prove their optimality. We derive new information theoretic outer bounds. In our intuitive interpretation, our proofs find the connection between the rate of the message and the rate of a secret key that is required to secure the message. Our results reveal nontrivial characteristics of secure communication in erasure networks. We find that – in contrast to non-secure communication – the secret message capacity of a cut does not simplify to the sum of the capacities of the channels that form the cut, moreover, the secret message capacity of a network does not simplify to the minimum secret message capacity of its cuts.

EPFL2014

Secure Communication in Erasure Networks with State-feedback

László Czap

EPFL2014

Two-phase locking

Expanding phase: locks are acquired and no locks are released.

Shrinking phase: locks are released and no locks are acquired.

A Petri Net Model for FDDI

Model checking transactional memories

Secure Communication in Erasure Networks with State-feedback

A Petri Net Model for FDDI

Model checking transactional memories

Secure Communication in Erasure Networks with State-feedback