[messaging] collaborative random number generation

[str4d]

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Trevor Perrin wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 7:59 PM, Jeff Burdges <burdges at gnunet.org> 
> wrote:
>> Tor has avoided these attacks in their hidden service redesign 
>> specification, but they do so by asking the directory
>> authorities to generate a random number collaboratively using
>> commit and reveal.
> 
> The Tor HSdir mechanism is solving a different problem - it makes 
> it hard to become a DHT node that will store certain entries.

This is something that I am also interested in, from the perspective
of I2P's netDb. Entries are currently stored at location H(H(entry) +
yyyyMMdd), which was chosen back in 2003/4 to try and raise the
barrier to partial-keyspace attacks. Recent research shows it isn't
very effective, and thus I2P would benefit from a common
non-predictable random seed, like Tor's HS 2.0.

> 
> I don't know how much you care about that.  I also don't know how 
> feasible it is for users to frequently re-publish all their 
> petnames, under different randomization.
> 
> But there's certainly literature on randomness beacons and 
> commitment schemes for this - the "random zoo" paper has some nice 
> discussion, for example:
> 
> https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/366.pdf

Yay, papers!

str4d
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