ferhimedamine/randrunner

Generating randomness collectively has been a long standing problem in distributed computing. It plays a critical role not only in the design of state-of-the-art Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) and blockchain protocols, but also for a range of applications far beyond this field. We present RandRunner, a random beacon protocol with a unique set of guarantees that targets a realistic system model. Our design avoids the necessity of a (BFT) consensus protocol and its accompanying high complexity and communication overhead. We achieve this by introducing a novel extension to verifiable delay functions (VDFs) in the RSA setting that does not require a trusted dealer or distributed key generation (DKG) and only relies on well studied cryptographic assumptions. This design allows RandRunner to tolerate adversarial or failed leaders while guaranteeing safety and liveness of the protocol despite possible periods of asynchrony.

RandRunner

This the project page for the RandRunner protocol, a new distributed protocol for generating publicly-verifiable randomness in a distributed fashion. This work is a joint research project by my team members Aljosha Judmayer, Markus Hittmeir, Nicholas Stifter and myself, conducted at SBA Research, TU Wien and Universität Wien, under the supervision of Prof. Edgar Weippl.

The corresponding research paper "RandRunner: Distributed Randomness from Trapdoor VDFs with Strong Uniqueness" was accepted at the NDSS Symposium 2021. We thank all anonymous reviewers and our shepard for the valuable feedback we received. The full paper is available online at https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/ndss2021_3C-2_24116_paper.pdf. Let us know if you are interested, have feedback or questions.

Research Artifacts

As part of RandRunner's evaluation, we simulated the execution of the protocol considering a broad range of different parameterizations and scenarios. The source code and results of these simulations are available as a Jupyter notebook.