Quick Summary: 📝
The tlock Go library and tle CLI tool enable practical timelock encryption, allowing data to be encrypted today but only decrypted at a future, predetermined time. It leverages the drand threshold network for secure and verifiable time-based decryption keys.
Key Takeaways: 💡
✅ tlock provides trustless, decentralized timelock encryption using the drand network's verifiable randomness.
✅ Data can only be decrypted after a specific, cryptographically guaranteed future time (drand round) has passed.
✅ It eliminates the need for central escrow agents or trusted third parties for time-delayed data release.
✅ Available as a robust Go library and a simple, versatile CLI tool (
tle) for immediate use.✅ The project is production-ready, relying on the high-availability League of Entropy drand network.
Project Statistics: 📊
- ⭐ Stars: 575
- 🍴 Forks: 32
- ❗ Open Issues: 4
Tech Stack: 💻
- ✅ Go
The fundamental idea behind tlock is solving the long-standing problem of trustless delayed data release. Imagine a scenario where you absolutely must release sensitive information, like a secret key or a confidential document, exactly at a specific future moment—say, midnight on New Year's Day—and you need an unbreakable guarantee that no one, including yourself, can peek at it even a second earlier. Traditionally, achieving this level of verifiable delay requires trusting a central escrow agent or a complex smart contract, both of which introduce potential single points of failure or exploitable vulnerabilities. Tlock eliminates this trust requirement by linking the decryption capability directly to the flow of verifiable, decentralized time.
Tlock achieves this revolutionary capability using the power of the drand network. Drand is essentially a global, distributed randomness beacon. Think of it as a highly reliable, decentralized clock run by independent organizations (the League of Entropy) that collectively generate verifiable and unpredictable random numbers at fixed intervals, typically every three seconds. When you encrypt data using tlock, you specify a future drand "round" number. The data is cryptographically locked until that exact round occurs and the corresponding random beacon is generated.
Only once the drand network generates the random beacon for that specified round can the necessary public key material be combined to generate the required decryption key. Since this process is distributed and relies on a threshold consensus among many participants, no single entity—not even the original encryptor—can cheat the clock or pre-calculate the key. This provides a cryptographic guarantee of the release time.
For developers, this opens up powerful and reliable possibilities. If you are building decentralized applications (dApps), tlock offers a robust mechanism for implementing verifiable commitment schemes, enabling secure sealed-bid auctions where all bids are revealed simultaneously, or establishing reliable time-delayed execution triggers for complex processes. The core implementation is a robust Go library, making integration into backend services straightforward. Furthermore, the accompanying tle command-line tool allows anyone to immediately leverage this capability for simple file encryption and decryption without needing to write any code. With compatible implementations in TypeScript and Rust also available, tlock ensures broad compatibility across diverse technology stacks. This project is a genuine game-changer for secure, time-sensitive data handling, providing undeniable cryptographic proof of release time.
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