We study whether Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) can be constructed in the (plain) Random Oracle Model (ROM) without any computational assumptions. A first partial answer to this question is due to Mahmoody, Smith, and Wu [ICALP 2020] where they rule out perfectly unique VDFs in the ROM. Building on this result, Guan, Riazanov, and Yuan [CRYPTO 2025] prove that VDFs with computational uniqueness and public-coin setup are impossible in the ROM. These works leave open the possibility of constructing computationally unique VDFs with private-coin setup in the ROM. We resolve this problem and additionally rule out computationally-unique VDFs with computationally expensive private-coin setup in the ROM.

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Impossibility of VDFs in the ROM: The Complete Picture

  • Hamza Abusalah,
  • Karen Azari,
  • Chethan Kamath,
  • Erkan Tairi,
  • Maximilian von Consbruch

摘要

We study whether Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) can be constructed in the (plain) Random Oracle Model (ROM) without any computational assumptions. A first partial answer to this question is due to Mahmoody, Smith, and Wu [ICALP 2020] where they rule out perfectly unique VDFs in the ROM. Building on this result, Guan, Riazanov, and Yuan [CRYPTO 2025] prove that VDFs with computational uniqueness and public-coin setup are impossible in the ROM. These works leave open the possibility of constructing computationally unique VDFs with private-coin setup in the ROM. We resolve this problem and additionally rule out computationally-unique VDFs with computationally expensive private-coin setup in the ROM.