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: 5475
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 9.251901e-05
Overall Rank: 2,052 | 85.93%
DOI: 10.1145/3035918.3064037

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Todd Warszawski (Stanford University)
2. Peter Bailis (Stanford University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{warszawski_sigmod17,
        title = {{ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications}},
        author = {Warszawski, Todd and Bailis, Peter},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '17},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3035918.3064037},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3035918.3064037},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
208	CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database	2020	SIGMOD	0.00024968157
3,683	Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB	2022	SIGMOD	7.2035148e-05
5,406	Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly	2022	SIGMOD	6.2289734e-05
6,574	IPA: Invariant-Preserving Applications for Weakly Consistent Replicated Databases	2019	VLDB	5.8371181e-05
7,347	Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases	2023	CIDR	5.6375582e-05
7,650	Litmus: Towards a Practical Database Management System with Verifiable ACID Properties and Transaction Correctness	2022	SIGMOD	5.5755646e-05
8,411	Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data	2024	VLDB	5.4309351e-05
8,715	Efficient Black-box Checking of Snapshot Isolation in Databases	2023	VLDB	5.3777365e-05
9,517	Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions About Transaction Workloads?	2025	SIGMOD	5.2566631e-05
9,891	GTX: A Write-Optimized Latch-free Graph Data System with Transactional Support	2025	SIGMOD	5.1997534e-05
10,467	LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,114	Chablis: Fast and General Transactions in Geo-Distributed Systems	2024	CIDR	5.093636e-05
11,593	A Demonstration of Multi-Region CockroachDB	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,605	IsoBugView: Interactively Debugging Isolation Bugs in Database Applications	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-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
19	A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels	1995	SIGMOD	0.00058720861
695	An Optimality Theory of Concurrency Control for Databases	1979	SIGMOD	0.00014910218
1,187	Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations	2014	VLDB	0.00011760199
2,057	Automating the Detection of Snapshot Isolation Anomalies	2007	VLDB	9.2495387e-05
2,228	Data Consistency Properties and the Trade-offs in Commercial Cloud Storages: the Consumers’ Perspective	2011	CIDR	8.9082751e-05
2,665	Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums	2012	VLDB	8.280143e-05
3,186	Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity	2015	SIGMOD	7.6559187e-05

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