Paper 2023/688
Applications of Timed-release Encryption with Implicit Authentication
Abstract
A whistleblower is a person who leaks sensitive information on a prominent individual or organisation engaging in an unlawful or immoral activity. Whistleblowing has the potential to mitigate corruption and fraud by identifying the misuse of capital. In extreme cases whistleblowing can also raise awareness about unethical practices to individuals by highlighting dangerous working conditions. Obtaining and sharing the sensitive information associated with whistleblowing can carry great risk to the individual or party revealing the data. In this paper we extend the notion of timed-release encryption to include a new security property which we term implicit authentication, with the goal of making the practice of whistleblowing safer. We formally define the new primitive of timed-release encryption with implicit authentication (TRE-IA), providing rigorous game-base definitions. We then build a practical TRE-IA construction that satisfies the security requirements of this primitive, using repeated squaring in an RSA group, and the RSA-OAEP encryption scheme. We formally prove our construction secure and provide a performance analysis of our implementation in Python along with recommendations for practical deployment and integration with an existing whistleblowing tool SecureDrop.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Africacrypt 2023
- Keywords
- time-lock puzzletimed-release encryption
- Contact author(s)
-
Angelique Loe 2016 @ live rhul ac uk
liam medley 2018 @ rhul ac uk
elizabeth quaglia @ rhul ac uk - History
- 2023-05-16: approved
- 2023-05-15: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2023/688
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/688,
author = {Angelique Faye Loe and Liam Medley and Christian O'Connell and Elizabeth A. Quaglia},
title = {Applications of Timed-release Encryption with Implicit Authentication},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/688},
year = {2023},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/688}
}