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International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security

FC 2020: Financial Cryptography and Data Security pp 541–558Cite as

Non-interactive Cryptographic Timestamping Based on Verifiable Delay Functions

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 12059)

Abstract

We present the first treatment of non-interactive publicly-verifiable timestamping schemes in the Universal Composability framework. Inspired by the timestamping properties of Bitcoin, we use non-parallelizable computational work that relates to elapsed time to avoid previous impossibility results on non-interactive timestamping. We introduce models of verifiable delay functions (VDF) related to a clock and non-interactive timestamping in the UC-framework. These are used to present a secure construction that provides improvements over previous concrete constructions. Namely, timestamps forged by the adversary are now limited to a certain time-window that depends only on the adversary’s ability to compute VDFs more quickly and on the length of corruption. Finally, we discuss how our construction can be added to non-PoW blockchain protocols to prevent costless simulation attacks.

Keywords

  • Non-interactive cryptographic timestamping
  • Universal composability
  • Verifiable delay functions
  • Time-lock cryptography

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://vdfresearch.org/.

  2. 2.

    https://medium.com/@chia_network/chia-vdf-competition-guide-5382e1f4bd39.

  3. 3.

    That is, \(x_{i+1}=a||\mathsf {H}(x_i)||b\) for some \(a,b\in \{0,1\}^*\).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Esteban Landerreche & Marc Stevens

  2. Institute of Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Christian Schaffner

  3. QuSoft, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Christian Schaffner

Authors
  1. Esteban Landerreche
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  2. Marc Stevens
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  3. Christian Schaffner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Esteban Landerreche .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. New York University, New York City, NY, USA

    Joseph Bonneau

  2. University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Nadia Heninger

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© 2020 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Landerreche, E., Stevens, M., Schaffner, C. (2020). Non-interactive Cryptographic Timestamping Based on Verifiable Delay Functions. In: Bonneau, J., Heninger, N. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12059. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-51279-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-51280-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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