Distributed Random Process for a Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Lottery
This addresses security issues in online lotteries for users and operators, though it is incremental as it builds on existing voting and lottery protocols.
The authors tackled the problem of verifiability and reliance on trusted third parties in online lotteries by proposing a novel distributed protocol that applies voting techniques to an existing lottery method, resulting in a scalable system with efficient verification and no trusted third party, as confirmed by an early prototype.
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the potential of protocols with no trusted third party. We argue that the security requirements of online lotteries are similar to those of online voting, and propose a novel distributed online lottery protocol that applies techniques developed for voting applications to an existing lottery protocol. As a result, the protocol is scalable, provides efficient verification of the random process and does not rely on a trusted third party nor on assumptions of bounded computational resources. An early prototype confirms the feasibility of our approach.