In their paper titled “Asynchronous Consensus without Trusted Setup or Public-Key Cryptography,” Sourav Das and colleagues present a novel protocol, ACS, for Byzantine consensus that eliminates the need for trusted setup and public-key cryptography, relying solely on cryptographic hash functions. This approach ensures post-quantum security and practicality with minimal use of cryptography and fast expected round times. Their protocol outperforms existing setup-free consensus protocols in terms of efficiency when tested with up to 128 machines in a geo-distributed setting. The authors also introduce new primitives like asynchronous secret key sharing and cover gather along the way, adding to the innovative nature of their work.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/677