Hello!

I’m Dr. Martin Kleppmann. I do various things:

• I am a research fellow at the TU Munich Department of Informatics, funded by a Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation (which is independent from the car company, in case you were wondering). I previously spent seven years in research at the University of Cambridge, where I received a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
• I work on local-first collaboration software and distributed systems security, and I teach an undergraduate course on distributed systems.
• If you have found my work useful, please support me on Patreon. The income from Patreon goes towards supporting my research collaborators. Thank you to my supporters!
• In 2017 I published a book for O’Reilly, called Designing Data-Intensive Applications. It covers the architecture of a broad range of databases and distributed data processing systems, and it is one of the best-selling titles in the publisher’s entire catalogue.
• I am a regular speaker at conferences, and recordings of my talks have been watched over 500,000 times.
• I have worked on various open source projects including Automerge, Apache Avro, and Apache Samza.
• Between 2007 and 2014 I was an industrial software engineer and entrepreneur. I co-founded Rapportive (acquired by LinkedIn in 2012) and Go Test It (acquired by Red Gate Software in 2009).
• I have composed several musical works, including “Die Türme des Februar” (in German), a musical-dramatic adaptation of the book by Tonke Dragt, which premiered in 2007 with a cast of 150 people.

Feel free to contact me.

Recent blog posts

Things I have written recently.

• 12 Oct 2022: Verifying distributed systems with Isabelle/HOL
• 03 Jan 2022: Book Review: The Future of Fusion Energy
• 01 Sep 2021: Several podcast interviews
• 14 Apr 2021: It's time to say goodbye to the GPL
• 23 Feb 2021: Building the future of computing, with your help
• Full archive

Highlights

Older articles that have remained popular.

• 02 Dec 2020: Using Bloom filters to efficiently synchronise hash graphs
• 18 Nov 2020: New courses on distributed systems and elliptic curve cryptography
• 29 Sep 2020: Writing a book: is it worth it?
• 18 Jan 2018: Should you put several event types in the same Kafka topic?
• 08 Feb 2016: How to do distributed locking
• 11 May 2015: Please stop calling databases CP or AP
• 04 Mar 2015: Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza
• 25 Nov 2014: Hermitage: Testing the “I” in ACID
• 05 Dec 2012: Schema evolution in Avro, Protocol Buffers and Thrift
• 07 Mar 2011: Accounting for Computer Scientists
• 05 May 2010: Valuation caps on convertible notes, explained with graphs

Conference talks

Events where I will be speaking or have spoken.

• 29 Jun 2023 at GOTO Amsterdam
• 29 Apr 2022 at Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It? (HYTRADBOI)
• 05 Apr 2022 at 9th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC)
• 28 Mar 2022 at RainbowFS final workshop
• 07 Dec 2021 at 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good (DICG)
• Full archive

Publications

Work-in-progress drafts:

• Martin Kleppmann. Implementing Curve25519/X25519: A Tutorial on Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
• Martin Kleppmann and Heidi Howard. Byzantine Eventual Consistency and the Fundamental Limits of Peer-to-Peer Databases. Preprint arXiv:2012.00472, December 2020.

Books:

• Martin Kleppmann and Mitch Seymour: “Secret Colors: A Gentle Introduction to Cryptography”. Round Robin Publishing, April 2022.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”. O’Reilly Media, March 2017.

Peer-reviewed papers in journals and top-tier conferences:

• Geoffrey Litt, Sarah Lim, Martin Kleppmann, and Peter van Hardenberg: “Peritext: A CRDT for Collaborative Rich Text Editing”. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), Volume 6, Issue CSCW2, Article 531, November 2022. doi:10.1145/3555644
• Matthew Weidner, Martin Kleppmann, Daniel Hugenroth, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees”. ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2021. doi:10.1145/3460120.3484542
• Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, Victor B. F. Gomes, and Alastair R. Beresford: “A highly-available move operation for replicated trees”. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 33(7):1711–1724, October 2021. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2021.3118603
• Daniel Hugenroth, Martin Kleppmann, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Rollercoaster: An Efficient Group-Multicast Scheme for Mix Networks”. 30th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2021.
• Stephan A. Kollmann, Martin Kleppmann, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Snapdoc: Authenticated snapshots with history privacy in peer-to-peer collaborative editing”. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), Vol. 2019, Issue 3, July 2019. doi:10.2478/popets-2019-0044
• Victor B. F. Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems”. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL), Vol. 1, OOPSLA, Article 109, October 2017. doi:10.1145/3133933 — Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award! :-)
• Martin Kleppmann and Alastair R. Beresford: “A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype”. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 28(10):2733–2746, April 2017. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2017.2697382

Peer-reviewed papers in other conferences and workshops:

• Martin Kleppmann: “Making CRDTs Byzantine Fault Tolerant”. 9th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), April 2022. doi:10.1145/3517209.3524042
• Peter van Hardenberg and Martin Kleppmann: “PushPin: Towards Production-Quality Peer-to-Peer Collaboration”. 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), April 2020. doi:10.1145/3380787.3393683
• Martin Kleppmann: “Moving Elements in List CRDTs”. 7th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), April 2020. doi:10.1145/3380787.3393677
• Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan: “Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud”. ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! ’19), October 2019. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737
• Diana A. Vasile, Martin Kleppmann, Daniel R. Thomas, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Ghost trace on the wire? Using key evidence for informed decisions”. 27th International Workshop on Security Protocols, April 2019. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-57043-9_23
• Martin Kleppmann, Victor B. F. Gomes, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “Interleaving anomalies in collaborative text editors”. 6th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC), March 2019. doi:10.1145/3301419.3323972
• Martin Kleppmann, Stephan A. Kollmann, Diana A. Vasile and Alastair R. Beresford: “From Secure Messaging to Secure Collaboration”. 26th International Workshop on Security Protocols, March 2018. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03251-7_21 — Best Presentation Award! :-)
• Martin Kleppmann and Conrad Irwin: “Strengthening public key authentication against key theft”. 9th International Conference on Passwords, December 2015. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-29938-9_9

Invited papers, book chapters, and unrefereed reports:

• Karissa Rae McKelvey, Scott Jenson, Eileen Wagner, Blaine Cook, and Martin Kleppmann: “Upwelling: Combining real-time collaboration with version control for writers”. Ink & Switch, March 2023.
• Martin Kleppmann and Peter Alvaro: “Research for Practice: Convergence”. Communications of the ACM, volume 65, issue 11, pages 104–106, November 2022. doi:10.1145/3563901
• Martin Kleppmann: “Assessing the understandability of a distributed algorithm by tweeting buggy pseudocode”. University of Cambridge, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-969, May 2022. doi:10.48456/tr-969
• Martin Kleppmann: “Harm reduction for cryptographic backdoors”. 14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs), July 2021.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Thinking in Events: From Databases to Distributed Collaboration Software”. Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS), July 2021. doi:10.1145/3465480.3467835
• Martin Kleppmann, Alastair R. Beresford, and Boerge Svingen: “Online Event Processing: Achieving consistency where distributed transactions have failed”. Communications of the ACM, Volume 62, Issue 5, pages 43-49, May 2019. doi:10.1145/3312527
• Martin Kleppmann, Victor B. F. Gomes, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “OpSets: Sequential Specifications for Replicated Datatypes (Extended Version)”. arXiv:1805.04263 [cs.DC], May 2018.
• Martin Kleppmann, Victor B. F. Gomes, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “OpSets: Sequential Specifications for Replicated Datatypes (Proof Document)”. Archive of Formal Proofs, May 2018.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Apache Samza”. In: Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies, Springer, March 2018. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_197-2
• Victor B. F. Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford: “A framework for establishing Strong Eventual Consistency for Conflict-free Replicated Datatypes”. Archive of Formal Proofs, July 2017.
• Alastair R Beresford and Martin Kleppmann: “Data Governance and Modern Computer Systems”. British Academy and Royal Society workshop on the governance of data and its uses, July 2016.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Making Sense of Stream Processing”. O’Reilly Media, May 2016.
• Martin Kleppmann and Jay Kreps: “Kafka, Samza and the Unix philosophy of distributed data”. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 38(4):4–14, December 2015.
• Martin Kleppmann: “A critique of the CAP theorem”. arXiv:1509.05393 [cs.DC], September 2015.
• Martin Kleppmann: “Simulation of colliding constrained rigid bodies”. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, Tech Report UCAM-CL-TR-683, April 2007. doi:10.48456/tr-683 — Prize for best undergraduate dissertation! :-)