Private Attacks in Longest Chain Proof-of-stake Protocols with Single Secret Leader Elections

09/15/2021

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by   Sarah Azouvi, et al.

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Single Secret Leader Elections have recently been proposed as an improved leader election mechanism for proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. However, the security gain they provide has not been quantified. In this work, we present a comparison of PoS longest-chain protocols that are based on Single Secret Leader Elections (SSLE) - that elect exactly one leader per round - versus those based on Probabilistic Leader Elections (PLE) - where one leader is elected on expectation. Our analysis shows that when considering the private attack - the worst attack on longest-chain protocols - the security gained from using SSLE is substantial: the settlement time is decreased by roughly 25 a 33 that the security threshold is increased by 10 0.36 inthe SSLE case) and the settlement time is decreased by roughly 70 20