A Time-lock puzzle, or Time released cryptography encrypts a message that cannot be decrypted until a specified amount of time has passed. The concept was first described by Timothy C. May, [1] and a solution first introduced by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and David A. Wagner in 1996. [2] Time-lock puzzle are useful in cases where confidentiality of information is determined by time, such as an diarist who does not want their views released until 50 years after their death, an auction where bids are sealed until the bidding period is closed, electronic voting, and contract signing. [1] [3] They can additionally be used in creating further cryptographic primitives, such as verifiable delay functions and zero knowledge proofs. [3]
Time released cryptography can be achieved through several different mechanisms.
RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is a public-key cryptosystem, one of the oldest widely used for secure data transmission. The initialism "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977. An equivalent system was developed secretly in 1973 at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British signals intelligence agency, by the English mathematician Clifford Cocks. That system was declassified in 1997.
In cryptography, RC4 is a stream cipher. While it is remarkable for its simplicity and speed in software, multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in RC4, rendering it insecure. It is especially vulnerable when the beginning of the output keystream is not discarded, or when nonrandom or related keys are used. Particularly problematic uses of RC4 have led to very insecure protocols such as WEP.
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", and "the godfather of cryptocurrency".
Identity-based encryption (IBE), is an important primitive of identity-based cryptography. As such it is a type of public-key encryption in which the public key of a user is some unique information about the identity of the user. This means that a sender who has access to the public parameters of the system can encrypt a message using e.g. the text-value of the receiver's name or email address as a key. The receiver obtains its decryption key from a central authority, which needs to be trusted as it generates secret keys for every user.
In cryptography, a Schnorr signature is a digital signature produced by the Schnorr signature algorithm that was described by Claus Schnorr. It is a digital signature scheme known for its simplicity, among the first whose security is based on the intractability of certain discrete logarithm problems. It is efficient and generates short signatures. It was covered by U.S. patent 4,995,082 which expired in February 2010.
In cryptography, a random oracle is an oracle that responds to every unique query with a (truly) random response chosen uniformly from its output domain. If a query is repeated, it responds the same way every time that query is submitted.
In cryptography, DES-X is a variant on the DES symmetric-key block cipher intended to increase the complexity of a brute-force attack. The technique used to increase the complexity is called key whitening.
In cryptography, Khufu and Khafre are two block ciphers designed by Ralph Merkle in 1989 while working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Along with Snefru, a cryptographic hash function, the ciphers were named after the Egyptian Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Sneferu.
In cryptography, the eXtended Sparse Linearization (XSL) attack is a method of cryptanalysis for block ciphers. The attack was first published in 2002 by researchers Nicolas Courtois and Josef Pieprzyk. It has caused some controversy as it was claimed to have the potential to break the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher, also known as Rijndael, faster than an exhaustive search. Since AES is already widely used in commerce and government for the transmission of secret information, finding a technique that can shorten the amount of time it takes to retrieve the secret message without having the key could have wide implications.
Alice and Bob are fictional characters commonly used as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic systems and protocols, and in other science and engineering literature where there are several participants in a thought experiment. The Alice and Bob characters were invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman in their 1978 paper "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-key Cryptosystems". Subsequently, they have become common archetypes in many scientific and engineering fields, such as quantum cryptography, game theory and physics. As the use of Alice and Bob became more widespread, additional characters were added, sometimes each with a particular meaning. These characters do not have to refer to people; they refer to generic agents which might be different computers or even different programs running on a single computer.
In cryptography, the strong RSA assumption states that the RSA problem is intractable even when the solver is allowed to choose the public exponent e (for e ≥ 3). More specifically, given a modulus N of unknown factorization, and a ciphertext C, it is infeasible to find any pair (M, e) such that C ≡ M e mod N.
Kleptography is the study of stealing information securely and subliminally. The term was introduced by Adam Young and Moti Yung in the Proceedings of Advances in Cryptology – Crypto '96. Kleptography is a subfield of cryptovirology and is a natural extension of the theory of subliminal channels that was pioneered by Gus Simmons while at Sandia National Laboratory. A kleptographic backdoor is synonymously referred to as an asymmetric backdoor. Kleptography encompasses secure and covert communications through cryptosystems and cryptographic protocols. This is reminiscent of, but not the same as steganography that studies covert communications through graphics, video, digital audio data, and so forth.
In cryptography, a ring signature is a type of digital signature that can be performed by any member of a set of users that each have keys. Therefore, a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set's members' keys was used to produce the signature. Ring signatures are similar to group signatures but differ in two key ways: first, there is no way to revoke the anonymity of an individual signature; and second, any set of users can be used as a signing set without additional setup.
Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.
In cryptography, the Fiat–Shamir heuristic is a technique for taking an interactive proof of knowledge and creating a digital signature based on it. This way, some fact can be publicly proven without revealing underlying information. The technique is due to Amos Fiat and Adi Shamir (1986). For the method to work, the original interactive proof must have the property of being public-coin, i.e. verifier's random coins are made public throughout the proof protocol.
Identity-based cryptography is a type of public-key cryptography in which a publicly known string representing an individual or organization is used as a public key. The public string could include an email address, domain name, or a physical IP address.
This article summarizes publicly known attacks against block ciphers and stream ciphers. Note that there are perhaps attacks that are not publicly known, and not all entries may be up to date.
Amos Fiat is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in cryptography, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.
In cryptography, server-based signatures are digital signatures in which a publicly available server participates in the signature creation process. This is in contrast to conventional digital signatures that are based on public-key cryptography and public-key infrastructure. With that, they assume that signers use their personal trusted computing bases for generating signatures without any communication with servers.