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Cornucopia: Distributed Randomness at Scale

Authors Miranda Christ , Kevin Choi , Joseph Bonneau

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  • Security and privacy → Cryptography
Keywords
  • Randomness beacons
  • accumulators

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Abstract

We propose Cornucopia, a protocol framework for distributed randomness beacons combining accumulators and verifiable delay functions. Cornucopia generalizes the Unicorn protocol, using an accumulator to enable efficient verification by each participant that their contribution has been included. The output is unpredictable as long as at least one participant is honest, yielding a scalable distributed randomness beacon with strong security properties. Proving this approach secure requires developing a novel property of accumulators, insertion security, which we show is both necessary and sufficient for Cornucopia-style protocols. We show that not all accumulators are insertion-secure, then prove that common constructions (Merkle trees, RSA accumulators, and bilinear accumulators) are either naturally insertion-secure or can be made so with trivial modifications.

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Miranda Christ, Kevin Choi, and Joseph Bonneau. Cornucopia: Distributed Randomness at Scale. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 17:1-17:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.17

Author Details

Miranda Christ
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Kevin Choi
  • New York University, NY, USA
Joseph Bonneau
  • New York University, NY, USA
  • a16z crypto research, New York, NY, USA

Funding

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government, DARPA, Andreessen Horowitz, or any other supporting organization.
  • Christ, Miranda: Supported by NSF grants CCF-2107187 and CCF-2212233, by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and by the Algorand Centres of Excellence programme managed by Algorand Foundation.
  • Choi, Kevin: Supported by DARPA Agreement HR00112020022 and NSF grant CNS-2239975.
  • Bonneau, Joseph: Supported by DARPA Agreement HR00112020022, NSF grant CNS-2239975, and a16z crypto research.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Noemi Glaeser for suggesting the name Cornucopia.

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