SaTC: CORE: Small: Blockchain-based Mechanisms for Timed Data Release and Timed Transactions

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Timed release of data is a classical problem. Timed data release ensures that data remains secure and undiscovered until a prescribed release time and gets automatically released at the release time. Examples of applications requiring timed data release include secure auction systems (bidding information needs protection until all bids arrive), copyrights-aware data publishing (data is automatically released when the copyright expires) and secure voting mechanisms (votes are not allowed to be accessed until the end of the polling process). This project develops a highly decentralized solution for supporting timed release of data using Blockchain-based smart contracts that provide guaranteed protection against adversarial attacks on obtaining access to the data before the release time. This research also augments the timed data release techniques with mechanisms for decentralized timed transactions that enable scheduling of transaction functions without revealing the function inputs prior to the execution time. The project aims to produce the techniques, algorithms, design and implementation to enable timed release of data and timed execution in decentralized blockchain platforms. Research results from the project will be integrated into the security track courses at the University of Pittsburgh. The project will engage the security track students in the proposed research and development activities. New teaching modules related to blockchain-based decentralized application development will be incorporated as introductory modules for high school students. The project takes a transformational step towards building next generation decentralized infrastructures for supporting timed data release and timed execution of transactions that do not involve a single point of trust. A key aspect to this model is a suite of novel secure data management techniques that allows data to be published at a future time point without a single point of trust (i.e., the data becomes available at the release time and prior to the release time, it remains undiscovered and unavailable). The timed-release mechanisms route the protected data within the timed data release system in a deterministically pseudo-random manner, enabling it to automatically appear at the release time. The proposed techniques use a monetary incentive mechanism enforced by the blockchain to reward honest peers and penalize violators of the protocol. The mechanisms are designed to protect against both rational and malicious peers in the system. A key objective of the system design is to minimize the gas cost of executing the timed data release and timed execution protocols while maintaining high scalability and availability. The project demonstrates the use of timed data release and timed execution features by developing a suite of decentralized applications using the proposed techniques. The project implements the mechanisms using the contract-oriented programming language, Solidity and evaluates the techniques on the Rinkeby Ethereum test network.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.