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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)
Cecile Pierrot @ lip6 fr; benjamin wesolowski @ epfl ch
History
2016-04-14: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/370
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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