How a Decentralized Randomness Beacon Could Boost Cryptographic Security

Randomness is an essential piece of cryptography that ensures security by adding unpredictable information to the mix.

A beacon is a randomness generator that shoots out random numbers at regular intervals, which anyone can look at and verify.

League of Entropy's drand beacon network is unique in that it generates randomness in a new way that doesn't rely on a single point of failure.

Filecoin, a decentralized storage network, will be the first to use the randomness generated by League of Entropy as an integral piece of its network.

"Intuitively, this is why randomness is crucial in cryptographic applications - because it provides a way to create information that an adversary can't learn or predict," as a research paper on randomness from IEEE Security & Privacy magazine puts it.

There's another, different type of randomness that League of Entropy uses - public randomness.

There are various ways to generate public randomness today.

There is still one problem: Generally, you still have to trust the entity, whether NIST or some other organization, that generates the randomness.

It's a beacon generating randomness but in a decentralized way, to the extent that the several members composing League of Entropy are providing the randomness.

"Drand's largest deployment, the League of Entropy Mainnet, is a network specialized in generating randomness that can serve many applications rather than being tailored or embedded in just one application," said David Dias, research engineer at Protocol Labs and the drand project lead."The League of Entropy is creating the basis for future systems to leverage trustworthy public randomness online, and the new collaborative governance will only improve its ability to do so. We're excited to watch drand help prevent bias and detect manipulation in elections, lotteries, and distributed ledger platforms, and improve the Internet for generations to come," said Cloudfare head of research Nick Sullivan in a statement.