Secure and attack-resilient Release of Timed Information using Blockchains
Balaji Palanisamy · 2025
With recent advancements in data-oriented technologies, we are witnessing a huge amount of data exchanges on the Internet. Timed release of information refers to data security primitives that protect the data until a prescribed point of time before the data is made available to the recipient. Numerous applications require timed release of information. Secure auctions require the bidding information to be protected until all bids arrive to ensure the integrity of the auction. Similarly, timed release of information plays an important role in secure voting schemes where all votes need to arrive before the individual votes are made available for counting. Current implementations of timed data release are heavily centralized involving a single point of trust and control. Such centralized schemes are prone to attacks from insider threats, external malware and denial of service attacks even when the service provider offering the service is trustworthy. These concerns with centralized systems have reflected recently in a significant shift towards decentralized peer-to-peer and blockchain-enabled technologies that can enable decentralized protection of data integrity while ensuring data transparency. This talk will present our research on a special class of data infrastructures called self-emerging data infrastructures using blockchain platforms to support timed release of data based on a novel decentralized data release model. The self-emerging data release system keeps the protected data secure and undiscovered such that it is not available prior to the legitimate release time and the data appears automatically at the release time. Our research has developed a highly distributed solution for building decentralized timed release of data using Blockchain-based smart contracts that provide guaranteed protection against adversarial attacks on obtaining access to the data before the release time. A key aspect to this model is a suite of novel secure data management techniques that allows data to be published at a future time point without a single point of trust (i.e., the data becomes self-emerging at the release time and prior to the release time, it remains undiscovered and unavailable). The timed-release mechanisms route the protected data within the self-emerging data release system in a deterministically pseudo- random manner enabling it to automatically appear at the release time. Our research also augments the timed data release techniques with mechanisms for decentralized timed transactions that enable scheduling of transaction functions without revealing the function inputs prior to the execution time. Prior cryptographic solutions called Timed-Release Encryption (TRE) have tackled the timed data release problem in two ways, namely using time-lock puzzles and using third party time servers. The time server used in these approaches is typically a single point of trust and becomes a security bottleneck to the overall system. Furthermore, solving a time-lock puzzle for each timed data release is not only computationally expensive but also not scalable to a large-scale data infrastructure such as the one considered in our research. In contrast, the self-emerging data infrastructure developed in our research does not involve a central point of trust and is highly scalable, involving only a modest computational cost compared to the cryptographic solutions. The choice of blockchain platforms as the underlying data infrastructure network in the proposed approach is motivated by the fact that blockchain networks are huge-scale massively distributed systems that make complete decentralization possible, and they are inherently designed to be reliable and robust to failures. This talk will first introduce our research on decentralized infrastructures using blockchain platforms to support timed release of data. We will discuss how our techniques provide a highly distributed solution for building decentralized timed releases of data using Blockchain-based smart contracts that provide guaranteed protection against adversarial attacks aimed at obtaining access to the data before the release time. Specifically, we will illustrate how our protocols guarantee provable resilience for timed data release against both rational and malicious adversaries. We will also review our techniques for enhancing the reliability of the timed data release and for supporting dynamic control of data. Finally, we will provide some insights into our techniques for facilitating decentralized timed transactions that allow to schedule transaction functions such that the function inputs are revealed only during the execution time.