Paper 2023/688

Applications of Timed-release Encryption with Implicit Authentication

Angelique Faye Loe, Royal Holloway University of London
Liam Medley, Royal Holloway University of London
Christian O'Connell
Elizabeth A. Quaglia, Royal Holloway University of London
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
Creative Commons Attribution
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}
}
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