An Implementation Infrastructure for Server-Passive Timed-Release Cryptography

As online transactions become increasingly practical, a broad range of industrial and e-government applications have emerged which depend on time-based protection of confidential data. Despite theoretical progress in timed-release cryptography (TRC), there is still no implementation infrastructure that takes advantage of the latest TRC algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to propose such an infrastructure for pairing-based timed-release cryptography (PB-TRC) systems. Our model uses key generation centers (KGCs) which publish decryption keys periodically, and satisfies the security requirements of modern third party-based TRC schemes. Our approach combines the best features of existing models into a generic and complete infrastructure which is to support TRC. It is also "lighter" in terms of complexity and communication, and is as effective (in terms of security and related properties) as the TRC protocol it is used with.