Rolling a dice on Blockchain at a discount

Pratyay Mukherjee
Thursday | 26th September 2024 | 5 PM
Online

Randomness is an important resource in computing. In the blockchain/web3 space, many decentralized finance (DeFi) and particularly gaming applications, such as Lottery, Poker etc. crucially require a good source of randomness.  In this setting generating good randomness is particularly non-trivial — this is because the typical source of randomness relies on (computation on) private source, and it is notoriously hard to support private computation on blockchain. Therefore, off-chain private sources are used. However, one needs to ensure that the off-chain randomness sources perform the task correctly in order to ensure crucial properties, such as unpredictability, unbiasbaility etc. This leads to a new requirement, namely public verifiability, which guarantees that each randomness can be verified publicly. Typically, this is ensured by deploying a cryptographic object, known as verifiable random functions (VRF). While many existing on-chain VRF services satisfy the crucial requirements mentioned above, they often become too expensive to use. In this talk, I am going to mainly speak about new designs for providing on-chain randomness service, where randomness can be delivered at much cheaper price while preserving the crucial functionalities.

His talk is based on the ACM CCS 2023 paper and other on-going works, jointly done with Aniket Kate (Purdue/Supra), Jacob Gorman (Supra), Lucjan Hanzlik (CISPA), Easwar Mangipudi (Supra), Siva Maradana (ISI Kolkata), Pratik Sarkar (Supra) and Aravind Thyagarajan (NTT, USA).

Speaker Biography

Pratyay Mukherjee is currently a Senior Director of Research at Supra. Previously he worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Swirlds Labs, a Research Scientist (and later a Senior Research Scientist) at Visa. Even before that he has been a Postdoc at EECS, UC Berkeley. He obtained his PhD from Aarhus University in 2015, M Tech in Comp Sc and Eng. from IIT Kharagpur in 2011, and B.E. in Electronic and Telecom. from Jadavpur University in 2008. His primary area of research is theoretical and applied cryptography. His research focuses on analyzing, designing and formalizing practical cryptographic problems using theoretical tools and framework.