Paper 2024/770

Sublinear-Round Broadcast without Trusted Setup

Abstract

Byzantine broadcast is one of the fundamental problems in distributed computing. Many of its practical applications, from multiparty computation to consensus mechanisms for blockchains, require increasingly weaker trust assumptions, as well as scalability for an ever-growing number of users $n$. This rules out existing solutions which run in a linear number of rounds in $n$ or rely on trusted setup requirements. In this paper, we propose the first sublinear-round and trustless Byzantine broadcast protocol for the dishonest majority setting. Unlike previous sublinear-round protocols, our protocol assumes neither the existence of a trusted dealer who honestly issues keys and correlated random strings to the parties nor random oracles. Instead, we present a solution whose setup is limited to an unstructured uniform reference string and a plain public key infrastructure (a.k.a. bulletin-board PKI). Our broadcast protocol builds on top of a moderated gradecast protocol which parties can use to reach weak agreement on shared random strings. Using these strings, we can then run in an unbiased fashion a committee-based Byzantine protocol, similar to that of Chan et al. (PKC 2020), which terminates in a sublinear number of rounds. To this end, we propose a novel construction for committee election, which does not rely either on random oracles or on a trusted setup, and uses NIZKs and time-lock puzzles. Our protocol is resilient against an adaptive adversary who corrupts any constant fraction of parties.

Note: This work is an extensive update, including additional authors, of a previous work which can be found in https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1383