This is for computing and verifying the randomness beacon used in the Powers of Tau and Sapling MPC ceremonies, using hardware acceleration if available.
The beacon is computed using 2^42 iterations of SHA-256.
The files powersoftau.txt and sapling.txt each contain 1025 hashes (1024
sequential pairs), allowing the beacon to be verified more quickly in parallel.
Two hardware-accelerated implementations are available, along with a non-accelerated fallback. Currently, Intel SHA extensions (e.g. AMD Ryzen) and ARMv8 cryptographic extensions are supported.
cargo run --release --bin compute > pairs.txtcargo run --release --bin verify < pairs.txt
The time taken is around 130 cycles per iteration on AMD Ryzen, which is ~1h45m to verify on on 24 cores running at 3.8GHz.