2026-08-16T23:36:06Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:20937 2024-09-16T10:19:08Z ddc:004 open_access

Accountable Secret Leader Election Christ, Miranda Choi, Kevin McKelvie, Walter Bonneau, Joseph Malkin, Tal Consensus Protocols Single Secret Leader Election Accountability We consider the problem of secret leader election with accountability. Secret leader election protocols counter adaptive adversaries by keeping the identities of elected leaders secret until they choose to reveal themselves, but in existing protocols this means it is impossible to determine who was elected leader if they fail to act. This opens the door to undetectable withholding attacks, where leaders fail to act in order to slow the protocol or bias future elections in their favor. We formally define accountability (in weak and strong variants) for secret leader election protocols. We present three paradigms for adding accountability, using delay-based cryptography, enforced key revelation, or threshold committees, all of which ensure that after some time delay the result of the election becomes public. The paradigm can be chosen to balance trust assumptions, protocol efficiency, and the length of the delay before leaders are revealed. Along the way, we introduce several new cryptographic tools including re-randomizable timed commitments and timed VRFs. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Miranda Christ and Kevin Choi and Walter McKelvie and Joseph Bonneau and Tal Malkin 2024 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 316, 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.1 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-209378 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.1 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode