Paper 2023/1570

Jackpot: Non-Interactive Aggregatable Lotteries

Abstract

In proof-of-stake blockchains, liveness is ensured by repeatedly selecting random groups of parties as leaders, who are then in charge of proposing new blocks and driving consensus forward. The lotteries that elect those leaders need to ensure that adversarial parties are not elected disproportionately often and that an adversary can not tell who was elected before those parties decide to speak, as this would potentially allow for denial-of-service attacks. Whenever an elected party speaks, it needs to provide a winning lottery ticket, which proves that the party did indeed win the lottery. Current solutions require all published winning tickets to be stored individually on-chain, which introduces undesirable storage overheads. In this work, we introduce non-interactive aggregatable lotteries and show how these can be constructed efficiently. Our lotteries provide the same security guarantees as previous lottery constructions, but additionally allow any third party to take a set of published winning tickets and aggregate them into one short digest. We provide a formal model of our new primitive in the universal composability framework. As one of our technical contributions, which may be of independent interest, we introduce aggregatable vector commitments with simulation-extractability and present a concretely efficient construction thereof in the algebraic group model in the presence of a random oracle. We show how these commitments can be used to construct non-interactive aggregatable lotteries. We have implemented our construction, called Jackpot, and provide benchmarks that underline its concrete efficiency.