Permissionless Consensus from a Common Random String

Permissionless consensus enables parties to perform Byzantine agreement without any a priori knowledge about who is participating, except for an upper bound on the number of participants running the protocol (no PKI, etc.). Since Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper, it has been widely believed that permissionless consensus is feasible provided the (Byzantine) adversary only controls a fraction of the collective computational power. However, all known protocols, including Nakamoto’s, rely on idealized assumptions (or ad hoc instantiations).

Is permissionless consensus possible without such assumptions? Surprising little progress had been made towards solving this open question until the recent result by Ball et al. (Crypto 2024), which showed how to achieve permissionless consensus from proofs of work (PoWs) based on fine-grained complexity assumptions in a setting where a randomness beacon is available to all parties running the protocol. Their work left open whether it is possible to remove the beacon assumption; this question is the focus of our work, which we resolve via a new consensus protocol construction that relies on a novel class of distributed samplers and a common random string (that does not need to be structured or sampled precisely at the onset of the protocol execution).

To prove our protocol secure, we revisit the concept of distributed samplers and adapt it to a setting where multiple sampler executions need to be simultaneously secure. To address this challenge we introduce the primitive we call d-wise independent distributed samplers and put forward constructions for such samplers based on DDH and LWE. We then present our consensus protocol via a modular design that utilizes a new moderately hard cryptographic primitive we call multi-verifier signatures of work, a sort of “time-based signature” we construct by composing distributed samplers and (fine-grained complexity-based) PoWs, and which may be of independent interest.