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Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

timelock.dev

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Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#121

Post by pjerem »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #115
pjerem wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because each node generates its own key pair and when encrypting a message you choose a random route and you use the keys of the nodes of your route to encrypt each layer.

So you can only decrypt the message if all the same nodes are still up? If anyone goes down you cant decrypt?

Yes.

However, you could mitigate this by calculating hundreds of routes.

But yes, you are right, that was just an interesting thought experiment before going to bed, I wasn't trying to revolutionize timelock encryption ;)

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#122

Post by pjerem »

bigyikes wrote: post #69
pjerem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spacecraft should generate the key pairs itself once it landed and send the public keys to earth to be sure no human stole the private keys. But, while fun, your idea is not that stupid. If the spacecraft continuously generate key pairs, you could even avoid landing it and "just" throw it in some direction, Voyager style (if you can afford rebuilding some every few decades) or on some orbit in the solar system. Y…

>I wouldn’t even be surprised that this could be viable economically. Do you imagine there's a large market for physically-based time locked encryption? Hard to imagine there's a ton of paying customers lol

I really don't know. I wouldn't be surprised that, on the entire planet, a niche market could exist that would want to pay the premium over say, giving an envelope to a notary.

You could also change the business model to allow NOT decrypting messages by paying the message author (and take a commission) but I guess that would attract more than shady customers :)

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#123

Post by ben_w »

illiac786 wrote: post #111
idiotsecant wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time crystals aren't the only thing that has properties that change in an orderly, predictable fashion. Plain old uranium has the same property. The answer to both is the same - put them on a very fast rocket and do a lap around the galaxy and see how well they agree with you on how much time has elapsed.

Is it not rather that time does not elapse everywhere at he same speed, simply put? Based on this, of course, measuring it becomes difficult. It's akin to measuring gravity. You can — for a specific point in space and time. (Time is even worse, since it is specific to a given _trajectory_ in space) But I have no idea what Im talking about.

It's identical to measuring gravity. In relativity, acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable, and it's acceleration which breaks the paradoxical symmetry that gives the name to the twins paradox.

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#125

Post by koliber »

BigParm wrote: post #93

It’s an interesting property of the universe that there’s no way to measure time directly. It clearly exists, yet all you can measure is change of things besides time. Time lock puzzles take variable time depending on hardware. You can’t really set an accurate specific release time. Any change in the universe that a computer can detect is just another spoofable input. Blockchain tries to solve essentially the same pr…

On human scale, is this a real problem? Consensus gives us the ability to measure elapsed time with a high probability. It seems kind of analogous how fundamental particles are probability fields. That means that in theory a baseball could teleport. But because a baseball is big spontaneous teleportation is not a real concern for anyone.

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#126

Post by crotchfire »

throwaway69123 wrote: post #104
BigParm wrote: post #93

It’s an interesting property of the universe that there’s no way to measure time directly. It clearly exists, yet all you can measure is change of things besides time. Time lock puzzles take variable time depending on hardware. You can’t really set an accurate specific release time. Any change in the universe that a computer can detect is just another spoofable input. Blockchain tries to solve essentially the same pr…

What about time crystals? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal

What about time cubes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#127

Post by Dunati »

troymc wrote: post #17

Here's a way to encrypt something with an actual timelock, which works because physics. More specifically, it works because there is a maximum speed that information can travel through space: the speed of light. Step 1: Generate a large number of named public/private keypairs and put the private keys on a spacecraft. Also give the spacecraft a communication system and a long-lived RTG (an energy source getting its en…

Frist, should probably put the ship on a solar escape trajectory, so that physically intercepting it would be more difficult with time, and likely require a technological leap to accomplish. It would also be nice to have the ship on a trajectory as far away from the plane of the ecliptic as you can, to minimize occlusion and time variation based on the earth's orbit.

Next, instead of pre-seeding the ship with keys, you have it generate them (using its RTG for both power and a source of entropy) and send them back to earth at a fixed rate, possibly with the size of the keys increasing over time.

On earth, when you want to encrypt a payload to be decrypted at a future date, you calculate how many round trips it would require, then encrypt the data with that many keys from the stream, interleaved with keys generated locally. As the time will unlikely be an exact round trip time (which is ever-increasing), each end can delay the decrypt and re-transmission for some proportion of the remaining time.

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#128

Post by bsdetector »

BigParm wrote: post #93

It’s an interesting property of the universe that there’s no way to measure time directly. It clearly exists, yet all you can measure is change of things besides time. Time lock puzzles take variable time depending on hardware. You can’t really set an accurate specific release time. Any change in the universe that a computer can detect is just another spoofable input. Blockchain tries to solve essentially the same pr…

> there’s no way to measure time directly. It clearly exists, yet all you can measure is change of things besides time.

If it can't be measured then it can't be said to clearly exist.

Imagine a cellular automata where particles have lots of "slots" that could be used for moving or interacting. As the particle speeds up and more slots are used for moving, there are fewer slots for the kind of interaction change that we use to measure time. At the highest speed, with all possible slots used for motion, the particle would experience no change, which is indistinguishable from no time passing.

Does that sound familiar to anything? It's certainly possible that light being a speed limit, time dilation, relativity, and so on are in some way actually describing change rather than time.

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#129

Post by crotchfire »

jslakro wrote: post #124

The only problem I have with this kind of tools/experiments is that you can begin to use it then in one or two years the domain expires and everything is over

I have that problem with the whole internet these days.

ICANN is a cancer.

Re: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the future using timelock encryption

#130

Post by denton-scratch »

So Cloudflare suggests there are two ways of doing timelock encryption: you can rely on some proxy for the passage of time, such as repeated hashing; or you can rely on one or more trusted agents.

I don't think the 'proxy' approach is timelock encryption, because it doesn't actually rely on the passage of time. Cloudflare is relying on a network of trusted agents that 'tick' at a predictable rate.

I think I wouldn't want to rely on this network of trusted agents to preserve a long-lived secret. There's no guarantee that the network will still exist when it's time to reveal thw secret.

Is there a way to do timelock encryption that doesn't involve reliance on a third-party, and that really depends on the actual time, rather than on a proxy for time? I cn't see it, but I'm not very clever.

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