Order-fairness

Ensuring order-fairness in distributed data management systems deployed in untrustworthy environments is crucial to prevent adversarial manipulation of transaction ordering, particularly in unpredictable markets where transaction order directly influences financial outcomes. While Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols guarantee safety and liveness, they inherently lack mechanisms to enforce order-fairness, exposing distributed systems to attacks such as frontrunning and sandwiching. Previous attempts to integrate order-fairness have often introduced substantial performance overhead, largely due to limitations of the underlying consensus protocols.

Publications

1. Heena Nagda, Sidharth Sankhe, Sakshi Sinha, Keon Attarha, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Boon Thau Loo. “Dag of dags: Order-fairness made practical.” Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2026.

2. Heena Nagda, Shubhendra Pal Singhal, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Boon Thau Loo. “Rashnu: Data-Dependent Order-Fairness.” Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2024.

People

Heena Nagda

PhD, Penn, 2025 (co-advised with Boon), next: Research Scientist, Meta

Sakshi Sinha

M.S, 2025, next: Software Engineer, Infosys

Keon Attarha

Simons Research Fellow, next: B.S at Princeton

Boon Thau Loo

Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Mohammad Javad Amiri

Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University