abstract.tex

\begin{abstract}
This paper presents a new type of
wide-area service called a \textit{storage kernel}.  Unlike
wide-area storage systems, a storage kernel offers a user-programmable
data-plane, where each user controls how reads and writes affect their
data independently of applications.  By doing so, users are able to leverage existing
storage services for availability and persistence, and implement arbitrarily
complex storage functionality on top of them in a portable manner.
This isolates applications from underlying
service behavior, makes services functionally interchangeable, and
separate applications logic from both storage and user authentication logic.

The purpose of a storage kernel is to facilitate the construction of
wide-area applications that keep their state on untrusted user storage, while remaining
agnostic to their implementations.  This not only puts users back in control
of their data, but also reduces application complexity--in some cases,
obviating the need for application-specific servers entirely.

To validate the concept, we present a prototype storage kernel called
Waskern, which uses a sovereign identity system to
implement a runtime for these applications without introducing a single point of trust.
We show that Waskern enables the construction of three non-trivial wide-area
applications using freely-available cloud storage services.  Waskern does
so while offering performance comparable to a heavyweight Web application,
while only requiring a small amount of reusable storage logic written in Python.

\end{abstract}