ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications

Summary: ACIDRain formalizes concurrency exploits in database-backed apps under weak isolation, enabling programmable API attacks. We introduce Abstract Anomaly Detection (2AD), a language-agnostic dynamic-trace method to detect isolation anomalies; tested on 12 apps across four languages, exposing 22 ACIDRain attacks. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5413
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 9.842936e-05
Overall Rank: 1,994 | 86.13%
DOI: 10.1145/3035918.3064037

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Todd Warszawski
2. Peter Bailis

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
390	CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database	2020	SIGMOD	0.00024607299
4,153	Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB	2022	SIGMOD	6.4045807e-05
5,822	Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly	2022	SIGMOD	5.313161e-05
6,238	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.14228e-05
7,618	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	4.6944277e-05
8,144	Litmus: Towards a Practical Database Management System with Verifiable ACID Properties and Transaction Correctness	2022	SIGMOD	4.576288e-05
8,481	Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data	2024	VLDB	4.501065e-05
8,800	Efficient Black-box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in Databases	2023	VLDB	4.4486165e-05
9,745	GTX: A Write-Optimized Latch-free Graph Data System with Transactional Support	2025	SIGMOD	4.2897489e-05
9,870	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	4.2667743e-05
10,178	LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,891	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
11,395	A Demonstration of Multi-Region CockroachDB	2022	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,407	IsoBugView: Interactively Debugging Isolation Bugs in Database Applications	2022	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
23	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00083894938
347	An Optimality Theory of Concurrency Control for Databases	1979	SIGMOD	0.00026610677
1,419	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00012079793
1,544	Data Consistency Properties and the Trade-offs in Commercial Cloud Storages: the Consumers’ Perspective	2011	CIDR	0.00011450594
2,133	Automating the Detection of Snapshot Isolation Anomalies	2007	VLDB	9.4752131e-05
2,653	Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums	2012	VLDB	8.3633807e-05
3,512	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.0250008e-05

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1,028	Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems	2015	VLDB	0.00014584518
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