Blockchain Lab, University of Edinburgh -

Ouroboros praos: An adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain

David, B., Gaži, P., Kiayias, A., & Russell, A. (2018). Ouroboros praos: An adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain. In Advances in Cryptology–EUROCRYPT 2018: 37th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Tel Aviv, Israel, April 29-May 3, 2018 Proceedings, Part II 37 (pp. 66-98). Springer International Publishing

We present “Ouroboros Praos”, a proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that, for the first time, provides security against fully-adaptive corruption in the semi-synchronous setting: Specifically, the adversary can corrupt any participant of a dynamically evolving population of stakeholders at any moment as long the stakeholder distribution maintains an honest majority of stake; furthermore, the protocol tolerates an adversarially-controlled message delivery delay unknown to protocol participants.