Cornucopia: Distributed Randomness at Scale

We propose Cornucopia, a protocol framework for distributed randomness beacons combining accumulators and verifiable delay functions. Cornucopia generalizes the Unicorn protocol, using an accumulator to enable efficient verification by each participant that their contribution has been included. The output is unpredictable as long as at least one participant is honest, yielding a scalable distributed randomness beacon with strong security properties. Proving this approach secure requires developing a novel property of accumulators, insertion security, which we show is both necessary and sufficient for Cornucopia-style protocols. We show that not all accumulators are insertion-secure, then prove that common constructions (Merkle trees, RSA accumulators, and bilinear accumulators) are either naturally insertion-secure or can be made so with trivial modifications.