Paper 2023/1554

Cornucopia: Distributed randomness beacons at scale

Miranda Christ, Columbia University
Kevin Choi, New York University
Joseph Bonneau, New York University, a16z crypto research
Abstract

We propose Cornucopia, a distributed randomness beacon protocol combining accumulators and verifiable delay functions. Cornucopia extends the Unicorn protocol of Lenstra and Wesolowski, utilizing an accumulator to enable efficient verification by each participant that their randomness contribution has been included in the beacon output. The security of this construction reduces to a novel property of accumulators, insertion security. We first show that not all accumulators are insertion-secure. We then prove that common constructions (Merkle trees and RSA accumulators) are naturally insertion-secure. Finally, we give a generic transformation from any universal accumulator (supporting non-membership proofs) to an insertion-secure accumulator, albeit with an efficiency loss proportional to the security parameter.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
randomness beacondistributed randomnessblockchainverifiable delay functionaccumulator
Contact author(s)
mchrist @ cs columbia edu
kevin choi @ nyu edu
jcb @ cs nyu edu
History
2023-10-11: approved
2023-10-10: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1554
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1554,
      author = {Miranda Christ and Kevin Choi and Joseph Bonneau},
      title = {Cornucopia: Distributed randomness beacons at scale},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/1554},
      year = {2023},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1554}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1554}
}
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