Secure data with immudb - a fast, immutable database
Leipzig Gophers Hybrid Meetup #30 took place 2022-09-20 19:00 CEST at Lancaster University Leipzig Campus.
We had a great presentation by Dennis Zimmer and Bartłomiej Święcki (GitHub) from CodeNotary about their cutting edge, open source, immutable database project immudb.
Presentation slides are available here:
Originally, the CodeNotary team looked at blockchains to implement the idea of tamperproof data store - but found that they could build something more performant. This work resulted in immudb, a lightweight, high-speed immutable database which is written in Go and uses Merkle-Trees at its core.
Starting with a key-value database, immudb by now supports a dialect and subset
of SQL as well and can speak the Postgres wire
protocol. Some
challenges include the immutable representation of statements like ALTER TABLE and the like.
The project takes advantage of Go’s excellent deployment story and is set up in a few minutes. Currently, SDKs are available for Java, Go, .NET, Python and nodejs - which makes integration in applications much simpler (see also client examples).
To ensure the validity of the data, clients and server work together: Clients can keep track of the state of the database (which takes only a few bytes) and validate against the server.
To learn more about the project and the internals of immudb, please also check out the FOSDEM 2022 talk by BartÅ‚omiej ÅšwiÄ™cki: Don’t trust us, trust the math behind immudb: How immudb protects safety critical data (with math and cryptography) and the paper: immudb: A Lightweight, Performant Immutable Database.
Apart from the tech-talk and discussion, we gave away goodies: A Zimaboard, courtesy of CodeNotary and a copy of Cloud Native Go, courtesy of O’Reilly Media.
We may feature a project built with immudb and the winner of the Zimaboard in the future and hope Cloud Native Go will be a page turner!
Misc
- Thanks to Lancaster University Leipzig for providing a meetup space on a short notice (change of plans caused by a bomb find near Basislager - our original meetup location).
- Security of systems can increase, when the number of witnesses go up. A curious example: The New York Times has been hiding a blockchain since 1995, apparently: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995
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