Paper 2023/031

Sassafras and Semi-Anonymous Single Leader Election

Jeffrey Burdges, Web3 Foundation
Handan Kılınç Alper, Web3 Foundation
Alistair Stewart, Web3 Foundation
Sergey Vasilyev, Web3 Foundation
Abstract

A single-leader election (SLE) is a way to elect one leader randomly among the parties in a distributed system. If the leader is secret (i.e., unpredictable) then it is called a secret single leader election (SSLE). In this paper, we model the security of SLE in the universally composable (UC) model. Our model is adaptable to various unpredictability levels for leaders that an SLE aims to provide. We construct an SLE protocol that we call semi-anonymous single leader election (SASLE). We show that SASLE is secure against adaptive adversaries in the UC model. SASLE provides a good amount of unpredictability level to most of the honest leaders while it does not provide unpredictability to the rest of them. In this way, we obtain better communication overhead by comparing the existing SSLE protocols. In the end, we construct a PoS-protocol (Sassafras) which deploys SASLE to elect the block producers. Sassafras benefits from the efficiency of SASLE and gains significant security both to grinding attacks and the private attack as shown by Azouvi and Cappelletti (ACM AFT 2021) because it elects a single block producer.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
single secret leader electionelectionproof of stakeblockchainuc modeluniversal composability
Contact author(s)
jeff @ web3 foundation
handan @ web3 foundation
alistair @ web3 foundation
sergey @ web3 foundation
History
2023-01-11: approved
2023-01-10: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/031
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/031,
      author = {Jeffrey Burdges and Handan Kılınç Alper and Alistair Stewart and Sergey Vasilyev},
      title = {Sassafras and Semi-Anonymous Single Leader Election},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/031},
      year = {2023},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/031}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/031}
}
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