#### Paper 2022/687

##### Abstract

Single Secret Leader Election protocols (SSLE, for short) allow a group of users to select a random leader so that the latter remains secret until she decides to reveal herself. Thanks to this feature, SSLE can be used to build an election mechanism for proof-of-stake based blockchains. In particular, a recent work by Azouvi and Cappelletti (ACM AFT 2021) shows that in comparison to probabilistic leader election methods, SSLE-based proof-of-stake blockchains have significant security gains, both with respect to grinding attacks and with respect to the private attack. Yet, as of today, very few concrete constructions of SSLE are known. In particular, all existing protocols are only secure in a model where the adversary is supposed to corrupt participants before the protocol starts -- an assumption that clashes with the highly dynamic nature of decentralized blockchain protocols. In this paper we make progress in the study of SSLE by proposing new efficient constructions that achieve stronger security guarantees than previous work. In particular, we propose the first SSLE protocol that achieves adaptive security. Our scheme is proven secure in the universal composability model and achieves efficiency comparable to previous, less secure, realizations in the state of the art.

Available format(s)
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. PODC '22
DOI
10.1145/3519270.3538424
Keywords
Secret Leader Election Consensus Blockchain Proof of Stake Universal Composability Active Security
Contact author(s)
catalano @ dmi unict it
dario fiore @ imdea org
emanuele giunta @ imdea org
History
2022-09-19: revised
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/687

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/687,
author = {Dario Catalano and Dario Fiore and Emanuele Giunta},