Public, verifiable, and unbiasable randomness: wassat?

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Randomness is infamously known for biting developers whenever cryptography is involved. Now that distributed systems are becoming a thing and also have to deal with it, let's explore what's what.

In this talk, we will walk through what's randomness, and why it matters. We will discover the different "flavours" of randomness, from the "private" to the "public" one, including the "verifiable", the "distributed" and the infamous "lack of" randomness.
We will discover a few use-cases for each of these, discuss the problems lurking behind each, and existing solutions to avoid them.
Finally we will (re)discover "drand", a distributed randomness open-source software that allows you to run your own, join an existing network or just query good quality public, verifiable, distributed randomness. We will briefly cover the existing League of Entropy behind the main existing drand network, what it's being used for and why public randomness should be treated as a public service.


Yolan Romailler Applied Cryptographer, Protocol Labs

Yolan is an applied cryptographer at Protocol Labs delving into (and mostly dwelling on) cryptography, secure coding, and other fun things. He has previously spoken at Black Hat USA, BSidesLV, Cryptovillage, NorthSec, GopherConEU, and DEF CON on topics including automation in cryptography, public keys vulnerabilities, elliptic curves, post-quantum cryptography, functional encryption, open source security, distributed randomness, and more! He introduced the first practical fault attack against the EdDSA signature scheme and orchestrated the full disclosure with the code of the CurveBall vulnerability. Nowadays he's working on the distributed randomness project, drand, studying pairing-based cryptography, distributed key generation, and threshold systems. His most recent work was focused around Timelock Encryption.