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Mt. Random: Multi-tiered Randomness Beacons

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Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13906))

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Abstract

Many decentralized applications require a common source of randomness that cannot be biased or predicted by any single party. Randomness beacons provide such a functionality, allowing parties to periodically obtain fresh random outputs and verify that they are computed correctly. In this work, we propose Mt. Random, a multi-tiered randomness beacon that combines Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing (PVSS) and (Threshold) Verifiable Random Function (VRF) techniques in order to provide efficiency/randomness quality trade-offs with security under the standard DDH assumption (in the random oracle model) using only a bulletin board as setup (a requirement for the vast majority of beacons). Each tier provides a constant stream of random outputs offering progressive efficiency vs. quality trade-offs: true uniform randomness is refreshed less frequently than pseudorandomness, which in turn is refreshed less frequently than (bounded) biased randomness. This wide span of efficiency/quality allows for applications to consume random outputs from an optimal point in this trade-off spectrum. In order to achieve these results, we construct two new building blocks of independent interest: GULL, a PVSS-based beacon that preprocesses a large batch of random outputs but allows for gradual release of smaller “sub-batches”, which is a first in the literature of randomness beacons; and a publicly verifiable and unbiasable protocol for Distributed Key Generation protocol (DKG), which is significantly more efficient than most of previous DKGs secure under standard assumptions and closely matches the efficiency of the currently most efficient biasable DKG protocol. We showcase the efficiency of our novel building blocks and of the Mt. Random beacon via benchmarks made with a prototype implementation.

Ignacio Cascudo was supported by the Spanish Government under the project SecuRing (ref. PID2019-110873RJ-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), by the Madrid Government as part of the program S2018/TCS-4339 (BLOQUES-CM) co-funded by EIE Funds of the European Union, and by a research grant from Nomadic Labs and the Tezos Foundation.

Bernardo David was supported by the Concordium Foundation and by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (IRFD) grants number 9040-00399B (TrA2C), 9131-00075B (PUMA) and 0165-00079B.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is the model assumed by most random beacon constructions with the only exception (to the best of our knowledge) of [16], and proving security against adaptive adversary would require expensive techniques such as non-committing encryption.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Ignacio Cascudo

  2. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Bernardo David

  3. Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

    Omer Shlomovits & Denis Varlakov

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  1. Ignacio Cascudo
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  2. Bernardo David
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  3. Omer Shlomovits
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  4. Denis Varlakov
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Correspondence to Bernardo David .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NTT Social Informatics Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan

    Mehdi Tibouchi

  2. Indiana University at Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    XiaoFeng Wang

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Cascudo, I., David, B., Shlomovits, O., Varlakov, D. (2023). Mt. Random: Multi-tiered Randomness Beacons. In: Tibouchi, M., Wang, X. (eds) Applied Cryptography and Network Security. ACNS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13906. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33491-7_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33491-7_24

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