RandFlash: Breaking the Quadratic Barrier in Large-Scale Distributed Randomness Beacons

Abstract

Random beacons are of paramount importance in distributed systems (e.g., blockchain, electronic voting, governance). The sheer scale of nodes inherent in distributed environments necessitates minimizing communication overhead per node while ensuring protocol availability, particularly under adversarial conditions. Existing solutions have managed to reduce the optimistic overhead to a minimum of $O(n^{2})$ , where n represents the node count of the system. In this paper, we step further by proposing and implementing RandFlash, a leaderless random beacon protocol that achieves an optimistic communication complexity of $O(n\log n)$ . Evaluation results demonstrate that RandFlash outperforms existing constructions, RandPiper (CCS’21) and OptRand (NDSS’23), in terms of the number of random beacons generated within large-scale networks comprising 64 nodes or more (e.g., in sizes of 80 and 128). Furthermore, RandFlash exhibits resilience, capable of withstanding up to one-third of the nodes acting maliciously, all without the need for strongly trusted setups (i.e., embedding a secret trapdoor by trusted third parties). We also provide formal security proofs validating all properties upheld by this lineage.