Blockchain technology has enabled significant innovation in various fields such as creating new economies that work under different rules. As more solutions begin to be noticed and have an impact on daily life, the decentralized finance field will grow and attract more users.
Inspiration
Existing time-lock protocols either require spending a considerable amount of computation processing to unlock a file or having to trust some centralized third parties that can be compromised. The designed protocol is decentralized thanks to the used blockchain technology and it does not require considerable computational processing.
This project builds a completely new economy around time-locking files and secret sharing on the Aurora blockchain. It consists of an underlying protocol that rewards users for participating using Ether and an interactive web application used to interact with the system.
What it does
Firstly, a user encrypts a file and distributes it on IPFS, making the encrypted version highly available and picking a decryption time. The user also has to reward participation in this time-lock using Ether. The file will only be readable at the chosen time.
The protocol works by splitting a decryption key into multiple shares which get distributed to some secret shareholders that will only make their share public at the right time, after the time-lock deadline, in exchange for a monetary reward provided by the time-lock initiator. The protocol can also be extended to work with unknown time-lock deadlines such as a specific real-life event, by making use of trustable sources of information that will notify the participants that the action happened.
Shareholders can collude in order to decrypt the file before the deadline. We attack the trust with various methods but cannot fully stop it.
How we built it
We made use of PKI to privately distribute Shamir shares using a smart contract. The shareholders can interact with the protocol through a frontend designed with React and MUI.
Challenges we ran into
Privately distributing shares, motivating users to participate as shareholders, catching and punishing malicious shareholders.
Reliably stopping shareholders from colluding.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We ended up having a working project.
What we learned
Encryption, smart contracts, and frontend design. Dabbled with zero-knowledge proofs.
What's next for Pou Protocol
Finding more convenient ways for secret sharing that do not require public keys. Using zero-knowledge proofs.
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