Have You Distributed Randomness?

Presented at BSidesLV 2019, Aug. 7, 2019, 3 p.m. (55 minutes).

In June 2019, the open-source drand project will be jointly announced by its developer, Nicolas, and its current members, EPFL, Cloudflare, NIST and Kudelski Security.

Its goal? Providing a trusted source of distributed randomness that would enable new applications and could be a way to allow blockchains to provide actual randomness to smart contracts in the future.

This talk is about what distributed randomness is, what it means for developers, and why you'd want to use it. I will also present to you drand, a Go application implementing distributed randomness that was developed at EPFL.

Don't worry though: we will first discuss an overview of how it works without diving too deep into the gory cryptographic details. In addition, I'll demo how this cool new open-source tool works and explain you how you can use it in your own applications.

Disclaimer: this is NOT a blockchain talk, but rather a distributed system one.

Presenters:

• Yolan Romailler
  Yolan is a security researcher at Kudelski Security delving into (and dwelling on) cryptography, crypto coding, blockchains technologies and other fun things. He has spoken at Black Hat USA, BSidesLV, NorthSec, Cryptovillage and DEF CON, on topics including cryptography, public keys vulnerabilities, or vulnerability research, and presented at FDTC the first known practical fault attack against the EdDSA signature scheme. Yolan tweets as @anomalroil.

Links:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vm1IFpAMy0

Similar Presentations:

• DEF CON 21 (2013) / Conducting Massive Attacks with Open Source Distributed Computing
• Black Hat USA 2012 / PRNG: Pwning Random Number Generators (in PHP applications)
• May Contain Hackers (MCH2022) / drand: publicly verifiable randomness explained