Using Timed-Release Cryptography to Mitigate Preservation Risk of Embargo Periods

USING TIMED-RELEASE CRYPTOGRAPHY TO MITIGATE PRESERVATION RISK OF EMBARGO PERIODS Rabia Haq Old Dominion University, 2008 Director: Dr. Michael L. Nelson This research defines Time-Locked Embargo, a framework designed to mitigate the Preservation Risk Interval: the preservation risk associated with embargoed scholarly material. Due to temporary access restrictions, embargoed data cannot be distributed freely and thus preserved via data refreshing during the embargo time interval. A solution to mitigate the risk of data loss has been developed by suggesting a data dissemination framework that allows data refreshing of encrypted instances of embargoed content in an open, unrestricted scholarly community. This framework has been developed by exploiting implementations of existing technologies to “time-lock” data using Timed-Release Cryptology (TRC) so that it can be deployed as digital resources encoded in the MPEG-21 Digital Item Description Language (DIDL) complex object format to harvesters interested in harvesting a local copy of content by utilizing The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a widely accepted interoperability standard for the exchange of metadata. The framework successfully demonstrates dynamic record identification, time-lock puzzle (TLP) encryption, encapsulation and dissemination as XML documents. This thesis dissertation presents the framework architecture and provides a quantitative analysis of an implementation. The framework demonstrates successful data harvest of time-locked embargoed data with minimum time overhead without compromising data security and integrity. c ©Copyright, 2009, by Rabia Haq, All Rights Reserved