🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes, another paper set to appear in VLDB'25. It's always a treat to see what the academic world considers "production-ready." I must commend the authors of "Cabinet" for their ambition. It takes a special kind of bravery to build an entire consensus algorithm on a foundation of, shall we say, creatively interpreted citations.

It's truly magnificent how they kick things off by "revisiting" the scalability of consensus. They claim majority quorums are the bottleneck, a problem that was… solved years ago by flexible quorums. But I admire the dedication to ignoring prior art. It's a bold strategy. Why muddy the waters with established, secure solutions when you can invent a new, more complex one? And the motivation! Citing Google Spanner as having quorums of hundreds of nodes—that’s not just wrong, it’s a work of art. It’s like describing a bank vault by saying it’s secured with a child's diary lock. This level of foundational misunderstanding isn't a bug; it's a feature, setting the stage for the glorious security theatre to come.

And the algorithm itself! Oh, it's a masterpiece of unnecessary complexity. Dynamically adjusting node weights based on "responsiveness." I love it. You call it a feature for "fast agreement." I call it the 'Adversarially-Controlled Consensus Hijacking API.'

Let's play this out, shall we?

• An attacker wants to get their malicious node into the "cabinet." What do they do? Simple. They just run a little targeted DDoS or introduce network latency to the other, legitimate nodes.
• Suddenly, their compromised, lightning-fast node looks wonderfully "responsive" because it's not doing any actual work or, you know, running pesky security checks.
• The system, in its infinite wisdom, rewards this behavior by giving the attacker's node more weight. More say. More power.

You haven't built a consensus algorithm; you've built a system that allows for Denial-of-Service-to-Privilege-Escalation. It's a CVE speedrun, and frankly, I'm impressed. And the justification for this? The assumption that fast nodes are reliable? Based on a 2004 survey? My god. In 2004, the biggest threat was pop-up ads. Basing a modern distributed system's trust model on security assumptions from two decades ago is… well, it’s certainly a choice.

But the true genius, the part that will have SOC 2 auditors weeping into their compliance checklists, is the implementation. You're telling me this weight redistribution happens for every consensus instance and the metadata—the W_clock and weight values—is stored with every single message and log entry?

"The result is weight metadata stored with every message. Uff."

"Uff" is putting it mildly. You've just created a brand new, high-value target for injection attacks inside your replication log. An attacker no longer needs to corrupt application data; they can aim to corrupt the consensus metadata itself. A single malformed packet that tricks a leader into accepting a bogus weight assignment could permanently compromise the integrity of the entire cluster. Imagine trying to explain to an auditor: "Yes, the fundamental trust and safety of our multi-million dollar infrastructure is determined by this little integer that gets passed around in every packet. We're sure it's fine." This architecture isn't just a vulnerability; it's a signed confession.

And then, the punchline. The glorious, spectacular punchline in Section 4.1.3. After building this entire, overwrought, CVE-riddled machine for weighted consensus, you admit that for leader election, you just... set the quorum size to n-t. Which is, and I can't stress this enough, exactly how flexible quorums work.

You've built a Rube Goldberg machine of attack surfaces and performance overhead, only to have it collapse into a less efficient, less secure, and monumentally more confusing implementation of the very thing you ignored in your introduction. All that work ensuring Q2 quorums intersect with each other—a problem Raft's strong leader already mitigates—was for nothing. It’s like putting ten deadbolts and a laser grid on your front door, then leaving the back door wide open with a sign that says "Please Don't Rob Us."

So you've created a system that's slower, more complex, and infinitely more vulnerable than the existing solution, all to solve a problem that you invented by misreading a Wikipedia page about Spanner.

This isn't a consensus algorithm. It's a bug bounty program waiting for a sponsor.