Breeding unicorns: Developing trustworthy and scalable randomness beacons

Samvid Dharanikota, Michael Toft Jensen, Sebastian Rom Kristensen, Mathias Sass Michno, Yvonne-Anne Pignolet, René Rydhof Hansen and Stefan Schmid

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-22

Abstract: Randomness beacons are services that periodically emit a random number, allowing users to base decisions on the same random value without trusting anyone: ideally, the randomness beacon does not only produce unpredictable values, but is also of low computational complexity for the users, bias-resistant and publicly verifiable. Such randomness beacons can serve as an important primitive for smart contracts in a variety of contexts. This paper first presents a structured security analysis, based on which we then design, implement, and evaluate a trustworthy and efficient randomness beacon. Our approach does not require users to register or run any computationally intensive operations. We then compare different implementation and deployment options on distributed ledgers, and report on an Ethereum smart contract-based lottery using our beacon.

Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0232261 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 32261&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0232261

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232261

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().