# Sassafras

This article contains some notes about the Sassafras consensus engine.

Sassafras is also known as "BADASS BABE" or "SASSY". Developed by Jeff Burdges, Alistair Stewart, Sergey Vasilyev and others, it aims at fixing some short-comings of BABE and thus making the Polkadot network more secure.

## Sassafras via Schnorrkel

This is a simplified version of Sassafras, directly using Schnorrkel. This is mostly used as an intermediate process towards Sassafras via Ring VRF, and thus does not have the same strong security properties as Sassafras. The overall process works as follows:

1. At epoch $$N$$, each validator generates schnorrkel VRFs (VRFOutput, VRFProof), select those H_1(VRFOutput) passing the threshold, and send them to H_2(VRFOutput).

2. At epoch $$N+1$$, each validator publishes the VRFs they received, directly as transactions on-chain. 2.1. Runtime does not validate the VRF. Rather, it is validated by consensus engine at the end of the block. Invalid VRFs are simply ignored. 2.2. The reason for publishing as transactions is for future reward system extension, which will be han dled by runtime, and for reuse of transaction pool.

3. At the end block of epoch $$N+1$$, consensus sorts the VRF gathered as this epoch, using "outside-in" order.

4. The block proposers at epoch $$N+2$$ will be VRFs produced above.