TY - JOUR
T1 - Breeding unicorns
T2 - Developing trustworthy and scalable randomness beacons
AU - Dharanikota, Samvid
AU - Jensen, Michael Toft
AU - Kristensen, Sebastian Rom
AU - Michno, Mathias Sass
AU - Pignolet, Yvonne Anne
AU - Hansen, René Rydhof
AU - Schmid, Stefan
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors received no specific funding for this work. The first four authors were immatriculated as students at university during the study, while the last three authors acted as supervisors and individual contributors.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2020 Dharanikota et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/4
Y1 - 2020/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85083915758&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0232261
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0232261
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 32343754
AN - SCOPUS:85083915758
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 15
JO - PLOS ONE
JF - PLOS ONE
IS - 4
M1 - e0232261
ER -