Secret leader election in consensus could protect leaders from Denial of Service (DoS) or bribery attacks, enhancing the blockchain system security. Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE), proposed by Boneh et al., supports electing a single random leader from a group of nodes while the leader’s identity remains secret until he reveals himself. Subsequent research endeavors have introduced distinct approaches to realize SSLE, yet most of these solutions consume relatively high communication complexity. In this paper, we propose an extended SSLE scheme, Secret Multiple Leaders Election (SMLE), based on linkable membership proof. A general SMLE scheme supports the one-time election of multiple consecutive secret leaders while reducing the average communication cost of a single leader election to constant complexity. In particular, SMLE is proven to satisfy a newly proposed consistent unpredictability property for each leader. Specifically, two concrete SMLE constructions are constructed. The first construction is designed for non-interactive scenarios where pre-configured system nodes are not required. The second one is designed for interactive scenarios where nodes operate within a committee. Furthermore, we extend SMLE to Secret Committee Election (SCE) and realize the anonymous node allocation in sharding blockchains utilizing SCE, thereby significantly enhancing the security of the sharding system. Finally, the experimental results indicate that our constructions exhibit minimal communication and computational overhead. When integrated into sharding systems, our protocol could increase an adversary’s attack difficulty, with the enhancement proportion approximately equal to the shard number.

中文翻译：

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秘密多位领导人和委员会选举及其在分片区块链中的应用

协商一致的秘密领导人选举可以保护领导人免受拒绝服务（DoS）或贿赂攻击，从而增强区块链系统的安全性。 Boneh等人提出的单一秘密领导者选举（SSLE）支持从一组节点中随机选举一个领导者，而领导者的身份在他暴露身份之前保持秘密。随后的研究工作引入了不同的方法来实现 SSLE，但这些解决方案中的大多数都消耗相对较高的通信复杂度。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于可链接成员证明的扩展 SSLE 方案，秘密多重领导者选举（SMLE）。通用的 SMLE 方案支持一次性选举多个连续的秘密领导者，同时将单个领导者选举的平均通信成本降低到恒定的复杂度。特别是，SMLE 被证明可以满足新提出的每个领导者一致的不可预测性属性。具体来说，建造了两个混凝土 SMLE 结构。第一种构造是为不需要预先配置的系统节点的非交互场景而设计的。第二个是为节点在委员会内运作的交互场景而设计的。此外，我们将SMLE扩展到秘密委员会选举（SCE），并利用SCE实现分片区块链中的匿名节点分配，从而显着增强分片系统的安全性。最后，实验结果表明我们的结构表现出最小的通信和计算开销。当集成到分片系统中时，我们的协议可以增加对手的攻击难度，增强比例大约等于分片数量。