Participants of the ceremony sample some randomness, perform a computation, and then destroy the randomness. Only one participant needs to do this successfully to ensure the final parameters are secure. In order to see that this randomness is truly destroyed, participants may take various kinds of precautions:
- putting the machine in a Faraday cage
- destroying the machine afterwards
- running the software on secure hardware
- not connecting the hardware to any networks
- using multiple machines and randomly picking the result of one of them to use
- using different code than what we have provided
- using a secure operating system
- using an operating system that nobody would expect you to use (Rust can compile to Mac OS X and Windows)
- using an unusual Rust toolchain or alternate rust compiler
- lots of other ideas we can't think of
It is totally up to the participants. In general, participants should beware of side-channel attacks and assume that remnants of the randomness will be in RAM after the computation has finished.
(the above section is taken from the original powersoftau repository)
When contributing, Powers of Tau outputs the accumulator's hash to your terminal. This should be made available to the next contributor separately, as a checksum so that they can verify the file they have received is not tampered with.
As a final step, a randomness beacon is applied to the ceremony by the coordinator. This can be verified by running this software.