Verifiable Delay Functions
Shravan Srinivasan
Abstract
In this talk, we study the problem of building a verifiable delay function (VDF). A VDF requires a specified number of sequential steps to evaluate, yet produces a unique output that can be efficiently and publicly verified. VDFs have applications in decentralized systems - including public randomness beacons, leader election in consensus protocols, and proofs of replication. We formalize the requirements for VDFs and present new candidate constructions that achieve an exponential gap between evaluation and verification time.
This talk is organized by Aria