Practical large-scale distributed key generation

Generating a distributed key, where a constant fraction of the players can reconstruct the key, is an essential component of many large-scale distributed computing tasks such as fully peer-to-peer computation and voting schemes. Previous solutions relied on a dedicated broadcast channel and had at least quadratic cost per player to handle a constant fraction of adversaries, which is not practical for extremely large sets of participants. We present a new distributed key generation algorithm, sparse matrix DKG, for discrete-log based cryptosystems that requires only polylogarithmic communication and computation per player and no global broadcast. This algorithm has nearly the same optimal threshold as previous ones, allowing up to a 1/2 - epsilon fraction of adversaries, but is probabilistic and has an arbitrarily small failure probability. In addition, this algorithm admits a rigorous proof of security. We also introduce the notion of matrix evaluated DKG, which encompasses both the new sparse matrix algorithm and the familiar polynomial based ones.