Abstract
Rivest et. al. proposed a time-lock puzzle based on the RSA crypto algorithm. To unlock the puzzle a player has to perform a computation which has a well understood time complexity. However, in that puzzle scheme there is no way for a player to examine whether a puzzle has been constructed in good order and to play a puzzle may foolishly risk wasting a very lengthy time on trying to solve an intractable problem. This weakness prohibits the time-lock puzzle from any applications that involve distrusted parties (most imaginable applications do involve distrusted parties). We propose a new RSA-based time-lock puzzle which includes an efficient protocol to let a player examine the time needed for unlocking.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blum, M.: Coin flipping by telephone: a protocol for solving impossible problems. In: Proceedings of 24th IEEE Computer Conference (CompCon), pp. 133–137 (1982)
Cohen, H.: A Course in Computational Algebraic Number Theory. Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 138. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Pollard, J.M.: Monte Carlo method for index computation (mod p). Mth. Comp. 32(143), 918–924 (1978)
Rivest, R.L., Shamir, A., Wagner, D.A.: Time-lock puzzles and timed-release crypto. Manuscript, available at http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/RivestShamirWagner-timelock.ps
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mao, W. (2000). Time-Lock Puzzle with Examinable Evidence of Unlocking Time. In: Christianson, B., Crispo, B., Malcolm, J.A., Roe, M. (eds) Security Protocols. Security Protocols 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1796. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10720107_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10720107_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67381-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45570-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive