A tamper-resistant timed secure data transmission protocol based on smart contract

Many time-sensitive scenarios need to decrypt data at a specified time. The timed-release encryption (TRE) primitive can meet this requirement. However, in the single-time server TRE model, there is a single point of failure problem. Therefore, we propose a tamper-resistant timed secure data transmission protocol based on smart contracts. Firstly, by decomposing the ciphertext into ciphertext fragments, the amount of deposit that a single middleman needs to submit is reduced. Secondly, it provides the system with security redundancy that changes with the decomposition mode. Thirdly, the sender is required to submit the hash value of each ciphertext fragment to the blockchain network at the same time as sending data, so that the receiver can quickly verify the authenticity of the ciphertext to resist substitution attack. Security analysis shows that the proposed protocol model can resist interruption attacks, release-ahead attacks and replacement attacks. Finally, we conduct a monetary cost test on the Ethereum’s Rinkeby test network. The results show that our running cost is almost double compared with the existing similar scheme, but it is still very low and almost negligible compared with the value of the content and the expected profits it brings.