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.
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.