Publicly Verifiable Proofs of Sequential Work

Abstract

We construct a publicly verifiable protocol for proving computational work based on collision-resistant hash functions and a new plausible complexity assumption regarding the existence of inherently sequential hash functions. Our protocol is based on a novel construction of time-lock puzzles. Given a sampled puzzle $P \gets D_n$, where $n$ is the security parameter and $D_n$ is the distribution of the puzzles, a corresponding solution can be generated using $N$ evaluations of the sequential hash function, where $N>n$ is another parameter, while any feasible adversarial strategy for generating valid solutions must take at least as much time as $\Omega(N)$ *sequential* evaluations of the hash function after receiving $P$. Thus, valid solutions constitute a proof that $\Omega(N)$ parallel time elapsed since $P$ was received. Solutions can be publicly and efficiently verified in time \poly(n) \cdot \polylog(N). Applications of these time-lock puzzles include noninteractive timestamping of documents (when the distribution over the possible documents corresponds to the puzzle distribution $D_n$) and universally verifiable CPU benchmarks. Our construction is secure in the standard model under complexity assumptions (collision-resistant hash functions and inherently sequential hash functions), and makes black-box use of the underlying primitives. Consequently, the corresponding construction in the random oracle model is secure unconditionally. Moreover, as it is a public-coin protocol, it can be made non-interactive in the random oracle model using the Fiat-Shamir Heuristic. Our construction makes a novel use of ``depth-robust\u27\u27 directed acyclic graphs---ones whose depth remains large even after removing a constant fraction of vertices---which were previously studied for the purpose of complexity lower bounds. The construction bypasses a recent negative result of Mahmoody, Moran, and Vadhan (CRYPTO `11) for time-lock puzzles in the random oracle model, which showed that it is impossible to have time-lock puzzles like ours in the random oracle model if the puzzle generator also computes a solution together with the puzzle