In the age of Big Data, releasing protected sensitive data at a future point in time is critical for various applications. Such self-emerging data release requires the data to be protected until a prescribed data release time and be automatically released to the recipient at the release time, even if the data sender goes offline. While straight-forward centralized approaches provide a basic solution to the problem, unfortunately they are limited to a single point of trust and involve a single point of control. This paper presents decentralized techniques for supporting self-emerging data using smart contracts in Ethereum blockchain networks. We design a credible and enforceable smart contract for supporting self-emerging data release. The smart contract employs a set of Ethereum peers to jointly follow the proposed timed-release service protocol allowing the participating peers to earn the remuneration paid by the service users.We model the problem as an extensive-form game with imperfect information to protect against possible adversarial attacks including some peers destroying the private data (drop attack) or secretly releasing the private data before the release time (release-ahead attack). We demonstrate the efficacy and attack-resilience of the proposed techniques through rigorous analysis and experimental evaluation. Our implementation and experimental evaluation on the Ethereum official test network demonstrate the low monetary cost and the low time overhead associated with the proposed approach and validate its guaranteed security properties.
Our preliminary work on decentralized self-emerging data has studied the problem in the context of Distributed Hash Table (DHT) networks @cite_2 . The idea behind these techniques is to leverage the scalability and distributed features of DHT P2P networks to make message securely hidden before release time. In contrast to such DHT-based solutions that do not offer guaranteed resilience to potential misbehaviors, the decentralized self-emerging data release techniques presented in this paper employs a blockchain infrastructure that offers more robust and attractive features including higher protocol enforceability by using incentives and security deposits.
@cite_2
2734727053 2143339817 2151682391 2116910210
Releasing private data to the future is a challenging problem. Making private data accessible at a future point in time requires mechanisms to keep data secure and undiscovered so that protected data is not available prior to the legitimate release time and the data appears automatically at the expected release time. In this paper, we develop new mechanisms to support self-emerging data storage that securely hide keys of encrypted data in a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) network that makes the encryption keys automatically appear at the predetermined release time so that the protected encrypted private data can be decrypted at the release time. We show that a straight-forward approach of privately storing keys in a DHT is prone to a number of attacks that could either make the hidden data appear before the prescribed release time (release-ahead attack) or destroy the hidden data altogether (drop attack). We develop a suite of self-emerging key routing mechanisms for securely storing and routing encryption keys in the DHT. We show that the proposed scheme is resilient to both release-ahead attack and drop attack as well as to attacks that arise due to traditional churn issues in DHT networks. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of attack resilience and churn resilience. Large-scale distributed systems are hard to deploy, and distributed hash tables (DHTs) are no exception. To lower the barriers facing DHT-based applications, we have created a public DHT service called OpenDHT. Designing a DHT that can be widely shared, both among mutually untrusting clients and among a variety of applications, poses two distinct challenges. First, there must be adequate control over storage allocation so that greedy or malicious clients do not use more than their fair share. Second, the interface to the DHT should make it easy to write simple clients, yet be sufficiently general to meet a broad spectrum of application requirements. In this paper we describe our solutions to these design challenges. We also report our early deployment experience with OpenDHT and describe the variety of applications already using the system. Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and distributed hash-tables (DHTs) share key characteristics in terms of self organization, decentralization, redundancy requirements, and limited infrastructure. However, node mobility and the continually changing physical topology pose a special challenge to scalability and the design of a DHT for mobile ad-hoc network. The mobile hash-table (MHT) [9] addresses this challenge by mapping a data item to a path through the environment. In contrast to existing DHTs, MHT does not to maintain routing tables and thereby can be used in networks with highly dynamic topologies. Thus, in mobile environments it stores data items with low maintenance overhead on the moving nodes and allows the MHT to scale up to several ten thousands of nodes.This paper addresses the problem of churn in mobile hash tables. Similar to Internet based peer-to-peer systems a deployed mobile hash table suffers from suddenly leaving nodes and the need to recover lost data items. We evaluate how redundancy and recovery technique used in the internet domain can be deployed in the mobile hash table. Furthermore, we show that these redundancy techniques can greatly benefit from the local broadcast properties of typical mobile ad-hoc networks. There are several analytical results on distributed hash tables (DHTs) that can tolerate Byzantine faults. Unfortunately, in such systems, operations such as data retrieval and message sending incur significant communication costs. For example, a simple scheme used in many Byzantine fault-tolerant DHT constructions of @math nodes requires @math messages, this is likely impractical for real-world applications. The previous best known message complexity is @math in expectation , however, the corresponding protocol suffers from prohibitive costs owing to hidden constants in the asymptotic notation and setup costs. In this paper, we focus on reducing the communication costs against a computationally bounded adversary. We employ threshold cryptography and distributed key generation to define two protocols both of which are more efficient than existing solutions. In comparison, our first protocol is deterministic with @math message complexity and our second protocol is randomized with expected @math message complexity. Further, both the hidden constants and setup costs for our protocols are small and no trusted third party is required. Finally, we present results from micro benchmarks conducted over PlanetLab showing that our protocols are practical for deployment under significant levels of churn and adversarial behaviour.