Trust enhancement by multiple random beacons

Abstract

Random beacons-information sources that broadcast a stream of random digits unknown by anyone beforehand-are useful for various cryptographic purposes. But such beacons can be easily and undetectably sabotaged, so that their output is known beforehand by a dishonest party, who can use this information to defeat the cryptographic protocols supposedly protected by the beacon. We explore a strategy to reduce this hazard by combining the outputs from several noninteracting (eg spacelike-separated) beacons by XORing them together to produce a single digit stream which is more trustworthy than any individual beacon, being random and unpredictable if at least one of the contributing beacons is honest. If the contributing beacons are not spacelike separated, so that a dishonest beacon can overhear and adapt to earlier outputs of other beacons, the beacons' trustworthiness can still be enhanced to a lesser extent by a time sharing strategy. We point out some disadvantages of alternative trust amplification methods based on one-way hash functions.