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Multi-instance Publicly Verifiable Time-Lock Puzzle and Its Applications

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12675))

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Abstract

Time-lock puzzles are elegant protocols that enable a party to lock a message such that no one else can unlock it until a certain time elapses. Nevertheless, existing schemes are not suitable for the case where a server is given multiple instances of a puzzle scheme at once and it must unlock them at different points in time. If the schemes are naively used in this setting, then the server has to start solving all puzzles as soon as it receives them, that ultimately imposes significant computation cost and demands a high level of parallelisation. We put forth and formally define a primitive called “multi-instance time-lock puzzle” which allows composing a puzzle’s instances. We propose a candidate construction: “chained time-lock puzzle” (C-TLP). It allows the server, given instances’ composition, to solve puzzles sequentially, without having to run parallel computations on them. C-TLP makes black-box use of a standard time-lock puzzle scheme and is accompanied by a lightweight publicly verifiable algorithm. It is the first time-lock puzzle that offers a combination of the above features. We use C-TLP to build the first “outsourced proofs of retrievability” that can support real-time detection and fair payment while having lower overhead than the state of the art. As another application of C-TLP, we illustrate in certain cases, one can substitute a “verifiable delay function” with C-TLP, to gain much better efficiency.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There exist protocols that use an assistance of a third party to support time-release of a secret. This protocols’ category is not our focus in this paper.

  2. 2.

    It should not be confused with the “universally composable” notion put forth in [11].

  3. 3.

    As shown in [4], to ensure \(99\%\) of file blocks is retrievable, it suffices to set \(c=460\).

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Acknowledgment

Aydin Abadi is supported in part by EPSRC under “OxChain” project with grant number EP/N028198/1 and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under “FENTEC” project with grant number 780108.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Aydin Abadi & Aggelos Kiayias

  2. IOHK, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

    Aggelos Kiayias

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  1. Aydin Abadi
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Correspondence to Aydin Abadi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

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Abadi, A., Kiayias, A. (2021). Multi-instance Publicly Verifiable Time-Lock Puzzle and Its Applications. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12675. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_28

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