DisCO: Peer-to-Peer Random Number Generator in Partial Synchronous Systems

Abstract

Random number generators (RNG) are an underlying part of Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols and are critically important for many distributed applications on blockchains and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). A fault-tolerant approach needs the communication and computation synchronicity assumptions to resolve it. The authors present DisCO-an upgraded version of the No-Dealer algorithm. DisCO works under the partial synchronous assumption and guarantees output per run, compared to No-Dealer, which works in a synchronous model and either generates output or detects a faulty participant. DisCO's communication model is more practical than NoDealer's as it meets the Internet. We implemented DisCO as a decentralized application on Hedera Hashgraph DAG. The source code and performance tests are provided.