The Design and Implementation of a Secure Time Distribution System Based on Blockchain Oracle
Jianlei Hong, Jindong Zhao, Xuedong Zhang, Yukai Sun, Xuqiang Qiu · Advances in transdisciplinary engineering · 2025
With the proliferation of e-government, e-commerce, and other applications, the demand for secure and accurate time information services has become more and more urgent in various industries. The traditional time distribution service has some risks regarding the security of time information. To cope with this demand, a secure time distribution system based on blockchain oracle is designed and implemented to provide secure and trustworthy time distribution services for internet applications. In the system, the oracle mechanism is used to introduce external time source data into the blockchain to ensure that the time information is accurate and traceable, and the time saved in the blockchain is distributed to the clients through the time synchronization protocol. To address the time delay problem introduced by software operation, a software delay smoothing algorithm is designed to smooth and optimize fluctuating and uncontrollable software delays. The experimental results show that the software delay smoothing algorithm has a smoothing effect of 72.7% on software delays, and the systematic error caused by software delay in this system is 718.0 μs ,and the accuracy of the timestamps distributed to clients reaches the microsecond level. Compared with traditional methods, the secure time distribution system based on blockchain oracles significantly improves the accuracy of blockchain timestamps, and utilizes the decentralized and tamper-proof characteristics of blockchain to add a “traceable” feature to each timestamp, which can provide trustworthy time services for financial transactions, e-government affairs, and other key areas.