🚀 go-pugleaf

>>Does anyone out there have an idea of how to achieve this time-release of
>>info (probably of an encryption key rather than of a body of text) with the
>>independence of human good behavior but a decent time interval?

Wouldn't it be sufficient for many purposes to have a device that regularly
(e.g. daily) generates an encryption key and broadcasts this, but keeps the
decryption key secret for a well-defined period (one day, seven days, one 
year, ...) after which it adds it to the daily broadcast?

Maybe this quick-and-dirty solution has been suggested before, and it's
not bullet-proof at all. The paranoid will suspect that either the key
sequence is not really random or that the bad guys will gain access to
the internally stored decryption keys before the time interval is elapsed.
But now that we've arrived at talking about satellites, one could as well
assume that the time lock device orbits round the planet so that the Cosa
Nostra would have to rent a space shuttle to have a look at the stored
keys.

The software could be inspected by several independent scientists (and
hackers) to make sure that there is no pseudo-randomness in the keys and
that the memory cannot be tapped by special signals. After all, this thing
would need no control input at all. The daily dose of keys could be
distributed over the networks; whoever wants to, can compare them to the
direct satellite signal.

Such a solution would IMHO suffice for private and small business related
issues, not for anything that's worth launching your own rocket. Given
that, it's still safer than relying on upper bounds on the computational
power of future generations of workstations ...	
--
Detlef Lannert      DC3EK      E-Mail: tsos@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
"Gedanken sind nicht stets parat,
man schreibt auch, wenn man keine hat."             Wilhelm Busch