Looking over Journal of Cryptology, they appear to be a theory journal. So an attack on an implementation, based on hardware probably doesn't interest them as much.
In 2012 Mochizuki claimed to have proved the abc conjecture by developing a new branch of mathematics. He was a respected mathematician, but the theories he had developed were so complex no one could determine if he was correct. It took six years until two number theorists dissected the proof and found a fatal flaw in it.
I’ve worked with many libraries and frameworks and I haven’t seen transactions by default. Given how easy it is to deadlock yourself this way, for instance by naively making batch reads in random order. I doubt many libraries would make transactions the default.
For instance in rails and django you need to explicitly specify a transaction. Can you give an example of a framework that turns off auto commit by default and instead runs it at the end of http requests?
Generally a connection pool also checks the health of its connections. In SQL connection pools this can be done by executing a select 1, if this fails then a new connection can be attempted.
Innodb does not create locks for reads, unless in a transaction.
> SELECT ... FROM is a consistent read, reading a snapshot of the database and setting no locks unless the transaction isolation level is set to SERIALIZABLE. For SERIALIZABLE level, the search sets shared next-key locks on the index records it encounters. However, only an index record lock is required for statements that lock rows using a unique index to search for a unique row.