On: Show HN: Timelock.dev – Send a secret into the fut...

[victorbjorklund]

What stops you from just spinning up X nodes in your own private network if everything is open source? And then tell every node to decrypt instantly.

[pjerem → victorbjorklund]

Because each node generates its own key pair and when encrypting a message you choose a random route and you use the keys of the nodes of your route to encrypt each layer.

[adastra22 → pjerem]

What the person you're replying to is talking about is a Sybil attack. You pick random nodes, yes, but what if the list of nodes to pick randomly from is 99.5% the attacker? This is a real world attack that has been used against Tor, for example.

[pjerem → adastra22]

Thank you, I understand !

[victorbjorklund → pjerem]

So you can only decrypt the message if all the same nodes are still up? If anyone goes down you cant decrypt?

[pjerem → victorbjorklund]

Yes.

However, you could mitigate this by calculating hundreds of routes.

But yes, you are right, that was just an interesting thought experiment before going to bed, I wasn't trying to revolutionize timelock encryption ;)