Leader election protocol based on external RNG services
Aline Gouget, Jacques Patarin, Ambre Toulemonde · 2021
A leader election or consensus protocol for distributed systems is the process of selecting a leader among a group of entities to handle the decision around what information should be added to the ledger. With the advent of blockchain, several consensus protocols have been proposed to overcome the issues of the Bitcoin Proof-of-Work consensus protocol such as intensive power consumption and selfish strategies. In this paper, we propose a new leader election protocol that relies on external random number generator (RNG) services named Leader Election Protocol based on Trusted RNG Service Providers (LEP-TSP). External RNG services enable to reduce computation cost to elect a leader and strengthen the fairness requirement of uniform probability of being leader. First, we present a formal model of LEP-TSP based on the model proposed by Boneh et al. on the Single secret leader election. Then, we provide a construction of LEP-TSP and show that it achieves required security properties while more than 2/3 of participants are honest.