# The Efficient Server Audit Problem, Deduplicated Re-execution, and the Web

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08501 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08501/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Proof-of-Learning: Definitions and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05633/) (2021)
- [Dropout Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01614/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

You put a program on a concurrent server, but you don't trust the server; later, you get a trace of the actual requests that the server received from its clients and the responses that it delivered. You separately get logs from the server; these are untrusted. How can you use the logs to efficiently _verify_ that the responses were derived from running the program on the requests? This is the _Efficient Server Audit Problem_, and it abstracts real-world scenarios, including running a web application on an untrusted provider. We give a solution based on several new techniques, including simultaneous replay and efficient verification of concurrent executions. We implement the solution for PHP web applications. For several applications, our verifier achieves 5.6--10.9x speedup versus simply re-executing, with less than 10 percent overhead for the server.