The HP time vault service
Marco Casassa Mont, Keith A. Harrison, Martin Sadler · 2003
Digital information is increasingly more and more important to enable interactions and transactions on the Internet. On the other hand, leakages of sensitive information can have harmful effects for people, enterprises and governments.This paper focuses on the problems of dealing with timed release of confidential information and simplifying its access once public: it is a common issue in the industry, government and day-to-day life.We introduce the "HP Time Vault Service", based on the emerging Identifier-based Encryption (IBE) cryptography schema. IBE (public) encryption keys specify the disclosure time. These keys are used to encrypt confidential information. An independent time server generates and publishes IBE decryption keys correspondent to the current time, at predefined intervals.We discuss the advantages of this approach against current approaches based on traditional cryptography. A web-service based prototype is described, as a proof of concept.