Distributed Random Process for a Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Lottery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, verifiable distributed online lottery protocol inspired by voting techniques, eliminating the need for trusted third parties and computational assumptions, demonstrated through a prototype.

Contribution

It adapts distributed voting protocols to online lotteries, enhancing security and verifiability without trusted third parties or computational assumptions.

Findings

Protocol is scalable and efficient

Verification of randomness is practical

Prototype confirms feasibility

Abstract

Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the potential of protocols with no trusted third party. We argue that the security requirements of online lotteries are similar to those of online voting, and propose a novel distributed online lottery protocol that applies techniques developed for voting applications to an existing lottery protocol. As a result, the protocol is scalable, provides efficient verification of the random process and does not rely on a trusted third party nor on assumptions of bounded computational resources. An early prototype confirms the feasibility of our approach.