Paper 2016/370
Malleability of the blockchain’s entropy
Cecile Pierrot and Benjamin Wesolowski
Abstract
Trustworthy generation of public random numbers is necessary for the security of many cryptographic applications. It was suggested to use the inherent unpredictability of blockchains as a source of public randomness. Entropy from the Bitcoin blockchain in particular has been used in lotteries and has been suggested for a number of other applications ranging from smart contracts to election auditing. In this Arcticle, we analyse this idea and show how an adversary could manipulate these random numbers, even with limited computational power and financial budget.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- Random number generationBlockchainRandom BeaconBitcoinDyck language.
- Contact author(s)
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Cecile Pierrot @ lip6 fr
benjamin wesolowski @ epfl ch - History
- 2016-04-14: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2016/370
- License
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CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/370,
author = {Cecile Pierrot and Benjamin Wesolowski},
title = {Malleability of the blockchain’s entropy},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/370},
year = {2016},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/370}
}
