time.shackle – Sending Files to the Future
Encryption is everywhere in our daily digital lives. It protects our data from prying eyes when it travels from one place to another. It lets us see if data is authentic, if it has been tampered with, and much more.
Encryption is deeply complex yet surprisingly universal. In its simplest form, it scrambles – or encrypts – information with a digital key to turn it into unreadable junk, before it can be unscrambled – or decrypted – again by a matching key at the other end. In many ways, it is the digital equivalent of the armored cash van, safe deposit box or locked door, depending on how you look at it.
Of course, vans, safes and doors are physical things. And physical things tend to have all sorts of safety measures and controls in place. They might be in a bank or office, protected by many other doors, checkpoints, alarm clocks or even security guards.
With encryption though, all the bits and bytes are already sitting there on your computer. Nothing is going to stop you from reading out those bits once you have the right key. You simply decrypt, and there it is. Sometimes that's just too easy. That's why there is an ongoing effort to add more access controls to encryption. One of those controls is time.
Imagine time as a control. Imagine a time capsule, storing relics from the past, but digitally. You control exactly when its contents gets to be seen, whether it be 2 hours or 2 years into the future. You are about to send these files to another time in the future. This is called time encryption.
Time Sensitive Information
Time encryption is unusual. Some would argue it is a solution looking for a problem. Yet, it is something almost anyone could probably find a use for, if they gave it a try. To understand why, think about what it means to have time sensitive information.
When information is time sensitive, it is just not ready to share yet. You might think of a bunch of classified documents or a controversial report, sitting on someone's computer, waiting for its publication date. But it might as well be somebody's birthday present, prepared and ready to be opened on the big day itself. Or an artist's latest album, waiting for its much anticipated release day.
The point is, it could be anything. To fuel the imagination, let’s consider a few more cases:
Journalism
You are covering a controversial story based on a treasure trove of information. Your code of ethics, your standards encourage you to release your source materials, but doing that today could cost you your scoop, or could even risk the safety of others.
Research
You are publishing an impactful research paper. You are hesitating to share the underlying data and source materials because there might be an embargo or grace period at play.
Development
You are developing something exciting. Your source code needs to be private for the time being because are heavily invested in it, but your wish is to eventually share your source code with the world.
Investors
You are investing in a company with digital assets such as software or data models. You need more security to minimize the risk of losing the value of your investment in case of downturn events, but the company is not ready to hand over their assets.
Publication
You are publishing time sensitive information that is in high demand. Your website is at risk of traffic overload or even disruption at the moment of publication, resulting in a failure to release the information properly.
Security
Your line of work requires timely disclosure of confidential materials due to regulations, ethics, standards. The stakes are high. An early release could be damaging to systems, or even people. A late release could violate those standards.
In all of these cases, the author is burdened by having to release their materials, later, at exactly the right time. Time encryption takes away that burden. As an author, you simply encrypt, publish immediately, and forget about it. A reader, if not millions of them, can then just download and decrypt the materials at their own pace. The time encryption technology makes sure nobody can break the confidentiality until the right moment has arrived.
Essentials of Time Encryption
Time encryption is a tough nut to crack. To understand why, let's take a look at four qualities, four essentials of time encryption.
Accessibility
Consider this: even though you might have the key to a safe deposit box in real life, you still need to get in front of the actual thing and put the key in. In the same sense, you will need to power up a computer and an app to use any kind of encryption.
This seems mundane, but accessibility is all about the quality of being able to access something, if the need arises. This is relevant because time encryption adds a new element to the mix: a clock, one that is trusted and acts as a sort of key. Because it is trusted, it is always located somewhere safe, guarded, on some secure computer, perhaps of a trusted institution. And your computer needs to be able to talk to that clock, if need be.
Durability
Durability is concerned with how long something can last without malfunctioning. Anything that stores something for a long period of time, needs to keep working for that entire period of time. Indefinitely, if that were possible.
Think of cryopreservation as an extreme example. Bodies are stored at freezing temperatures in the hope for revival far in the future. Freezers must stay operational for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years and it is easy to see why this is hard to promise.
Devices may malfunction, disgruntled employees may unplug things, and companies may go out of business. The same goes for time encryption: it needs to keep working. Since it relies on a clock to keep the time, that clock needs to function – flawlessly – for a long time to come, or your data is toast.
Security
The clock involved in time encryption not only needs to be flawless, it needs to be hardened, it needs to be tamper-proof. Digitally and physically. Only then it is possible to trust it completely.
If it were possible to tamper with the clock's integrity, it would open up the door to much more trickery to make it run faster. The encryption could be fooled to open up much earlier than intended. The time element would fall apart entirely, making time encryption useless.
Trust
The quality of trust, together with security, remains a point of discussion for many encryption systems out there. Remember that the manufacturer, as creator of the system, has more knowledge of its own creation than anybody else. When it comes down to it, the user has to trust the manufacturer not to use secret trapdoors to bypass its own encryption algorithms.
In the case of time encryption, the user also has to trust the manufacturer not to tamper with the clock. The obscure nature of cryptography makes it difficult to establish absolute trust here. History has shown that even well known algorithms of the past have had trapdoors built into them.
In practice, a reasonable degree of trust goes a long way as manufacturers are expected not to care about individual uses of encryption.
Current State of Affairs
There are notable efforts today to bring time encryption into the hands of the general public. Our observation is that all known efforts fall short in accessibility and durability, if they are practical at all. There is a lack of a clear path to any practical long-term and daily use of time encryption.
On the accessibility front, all systems seem to rely on the availability of internet in a very fundamental way. Whether it is a clever blockchain, a "cloud" service, or a loose peer-to-peer network of cooperating institutions, they all need you to connect to them one way or another, now or in the future, before you can get to your data.
This raises a couple of questions. What if the blockchain, the cloud or the network goes down? What if you can't access the internet when you need to get to your data, for whatever reason? What if your provider doesn't want you to access those services? That's a problem.
The durability raises similar questions. What if somebody decides that the blockchain, the cloud or the network is to be phased out? We see this happen from time to time with blockchains and online services for whatever political, technical, commercial or regulatory reasons. What are the options if your time encrypted materials require you to wait another year, while the service is dead in the water in three months time?
The answer is that a time encryption service, or rather its technology, should not fundamentally rely on the internet. Instead, it should rely on a kind of clock source that is somehow accessible and durable.
A Solution
There is a path to accessible, durable, secure and trustworthy time encryption.
Timeshackle’s solution is to rely on a system – a clock – that does not use the internet, but is still accessible from most places on our planet. Just by looking up to the sky. In fact, our clock orbits in space, as part of the Galileo satellite system, and like GPS, millions around the planet rely on it for navigation. It is part of a reliable infrastructural system, funded by big transnational organizations on our planet, and is designed for extremely wide spread and long-term civilian use. It is substantial and mature enough to rely on to make time encryption durable and accessible to as many people as possible.
Over the last few years, a new feature called OSNMA was added to the Galileo system. This feature was the last theoretical step needed to build a secure clock that could sit at the core of our time encryption. Together with custom smart card technology known from the banking industry, it is possible to construct a device that is able to read time by looking at the sky, and to use that time to decrypt data sitting on your computer. Most of all, it won’t be fooled by anyone.
Before we get there, we first start with an online time encryption service for public use. This service lets us put our own technology to use, so that people can start using time encryption right away without needing a device at home. Given time, people that want to, can obtain these devices themselves for decentralized use at home.
The public service puts our solution in the same ballpark as other time encryption efforts, but the difference is that our underlying technology does not rely on the internet. And there is a clear path to decentralized use at home, making it more accessible and durable.
The ultimate goal is to be able to do time encryption independent of even a satellite system. An unforgeable clock at your fingertips. This will be the toughest nut to crack yet.
We hope you will be able to use it well. For whatever purpose you will find useful.
-CE
time.shackle is available at timeshackle.com.