Time Release Cryptography using a Cryptographic Beacon Time release cryptography is the notion of sending messages into the future: some information needs to be made available to a set of people simultaneously. For example, insider trading laws disallow critical information that may affect the rise or fall of a certain stock being released to certain parties ahead of other. If this information is sent at the time of release delays can be caused due to peak network traffic. However, another solution is using time-release cryptography by sending an encrypted version of the information ahead of time and release the decryption key when the information needs to be made available. Since the key is simply a value and can be mirrored on multiple websites across the internet there will be no delays in accessing it. This allows everyone access to the information simultaneously and no one is able to access the information before it is explicitly made available. The approach that we used here is of a sequence of numbers generated by a one-way function. This makes the calculation of values released in the past easy; however it is extremely difficult to calculate values to be released in the future. Individuals who wish to encrypt information for future simultaneous disclosure are given an encrypted future value to be used as a key. This ensures that the future terms in the sequence are not known before their release; however they can still be used as part of the encryption process.

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