README.md

Linearly Homomorphic Time-lock Puzzles (LHTLP) Implementation in Rust

This LHTLP implementation is written purely in Rust, building on top of num-bigint and num-primes crates.

It implements the protocol described in Section 4.1 of Homomorphic Time-Lock Puzzles and Applications, Malavolta and Thyagarajan, 2019.

What is a LHTLP?

A LHTLP is a linearly homomorphic time-lock puzzles. Time-lock puzzles are cryptographic primitives that allow to encrypt a secret in a puzzle that can only be recovered after performing a certain amount of operations that are inherently sequential (squaring in RSA groups). The linearly homorphic properties imply that a set of puzzles can be evaluated homomorphically, that is a set of puzzles of can be bundled up together or evaluated with a circuit as a single puzzle. See https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/635.pdf for more details.

Usage

Setup, generate and solve a puzzle

Setting up a LHTLP requires 2 parameters:

• lambda: security parameters that sets the number of bits of the randomly generated safe primes
• difficulty: number of iterations to perform, linearly increasing computation time when retrieving the secret with solve

 use lhltp::LHTLP;
 const difficulty: u64 = 100000000;
 const lambda: u64 = 64;

 let lhtlp = LHTLP::setup(lambda, BigUint::from(difficulty));
 let secret = 42;
 let puzzle = lhtlp.generate(secret);
 let solution = lhtlp:solve(puzzle);

Homomorphic evaluation of multiple puzzles

 let first = lhtlp.generate(42);
 let second = lhtlp.generate(13);
 let bundle = lhtlp.eval(vec![first, second]);
 let solution = lhtlp:solve(puzzle);

 assert!(BigUint::from(55u32), solution);