Open Access

ARTICLE

Distributed Timestamp Mechanism Based on Verifiable Delay Functions

Qiang Wu¹, Zhaoyang Han², Ghulam Mohiuddin³, Yongjun Ren^1,*

1 Engineering Research Center of Digital Forensics of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China
2 Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210008, China
3 Department of Cyber Security at VaporVM, Abu Dhabi, 999041, United Arab Emirates

* Corresponding Author: Yongjun Ren. Email:

Computer Systems Science and Engineering 2023, 44(2), 1633-1646. https://doi.org/10.32604/csse.2023.030646

Received 30 March 2022; Accepted 12 May 2022; Issue published 15 June 2022

Abstract

In the data communication system, the real-time information interaction of communication device increases the risk of privacy sensitive data being tampered with. Therefore, maintaining data security is one of the most important issues in network data communication. Because the timestamp is the most important way to authenticate data in information interaction, it is very necessary to provide timestamp service in the data communication system. However, the existing centralized timestamp mechanism is difficult to provide credible timestamp service, and users can conspire with timestamping servers to forge timestamps. Therefore, this paper designs a distributed timestamp mechanism based on continuous verifiable delay functions. It utilizes multiple independent timestamp servers to provide timestamp services in a distributed model and appends the timestamp to the data once the data is generated. Thus, it can prove that the data already exists at a certain time and ensure the accuracy of the timestamp. Moreover, a digital blind signature based on elliptic curve cryptography is utilized to solve the problem of timestamp forgery in timestamp service. Finally, the security analysis of the scheme ensures the data security of data communication system and the concurrency rate of timestamp. The experimental results also show that the scheme greatly improves the efficiency of digital signatures.

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Keywords

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