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Accountable Secret Leader Election

Authors Miranda Christ, Kevin Choi, Walter McKelvie, Joseph Bonneau, Tal Malkin

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Author Details

Miranda Christ
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Kevin Choi
  • New York University, NY, USA
Walter McKelvie
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Joseph Bonneau
  • New York University, NY, USA
  • a16z crypto research, New York, NY, USA
Tal Malkin
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Funding

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government, DARPA, Andreessen Horowitz, the Algorand Foundation, Google, the National Science Foundation, or any other supporting organization.
  • Christ, Miranda: Supported by NSF grants CCF-2107187, CCF-2212233, and CCF-2312242, by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, by the Algorand Centres of Excellence programme managed by Algorand Foundation, and by a Google CyberNYC Award.
  • Choi, Kevin: Supported by DARPA Agreement HR00112020022 and NSF grant CNS-2239975.
  • Bonneau, Joseph: Supported by DARPA Agreement HR00112020022, NSF grant CNS-2239975, and a16z crypto research.
  • Malkin, Tal: Supported by NSF grant CCF-2312242, by the Algorand Centres of Excellence programme managed by Algorand Foundation, and by a Google CyberNYC Award.

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Miranda Christ, Kevin Choi, Walter McKelvie, Joseph Bonneau, and Tal Malkin. Accountable Secret Leader Election. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 1:1-1:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.1

Abstract

We consider the problem of secret leader election with accountability. Secret leader election protocols counter adaptive adversaries by keeping the identities of elected leaders secret until they choose to reveal themselves, but in existing protocols this means it is impossible to determine who was elected leader if they fail to act. This opens the door to undetectable withholding attacks, where leaders fail to act in order to slow the protocol or bias future elections in their favor. We formally define accountability (in weak and strong variants) for secret leader election protocols. We present three paradigms for adding accountability, using delay-based cryptography, enforced key revelation, or threshold committees, all of which ensure that after some time delay the result of the election becomes public. The paradigm can be chosen to balance trust assumptions, protocol efficiency, and the length of the delay before leaders are revealed. Along the way, we introduce several new cryptographic tools including re-randomizable timed commitments and timed VRFs.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Cryptography
Keywords
  • Consensus Protocols
  • Single Secret Leader Election
  • Accountability

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