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Achieving reliable timestamp in the bitcoin platform

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Abstract

Blockchain, the underlying technology of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, is an innovation of information technology. The blockchain technology has been widely applied in the evidence storage scenarios to prove that an event occurred at a certain time due to its publicity and immutability. However, the timestamp of a block in the blockchain is introduced by the blockchain node and can be manipulated in hours. This will either lead the failure of the evidence storage system built on top of the blockchain platform or increase the risk of double spending of the blockchain platform itself. In this paper, we introduced an optimized blockchain timestamp mechanism. We narrow the range of the timestamp in a block to an average of ten minutes by leveraging an outside trust timestamp service to the blockchain consensus. Finally, we present a security analysis of the proposed scheme.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.61802180, 61702236, 61872181), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No.BK20180421), the National Cryptography Development Fund (Grant No.MMJJ20180105), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No.NE2018106), the State Key Laboratory Foundation of smart grid protection and operation control, the Science and Technology Funds from National State Grid Ltd. (The Research on Key Technologies of Distributed Parallel Database Storage and Processing based on Big Data).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210000, China

    Guangkai Ma & Chunpeng Ge

  2. University of Aizu, Aizuwakamatsu, 965-8580, Japan

    Chunpeng Ge & Lu Zhou

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  1. Guangkai Ma
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  2. Chunpeng Ge
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  3. Lu Zhou
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Correspondence to Lu Zhou.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Security and Privacy in Machine Learning Assisted P2P Networks

Guest Editors: Hongwei Li, Rongxing Lu and Mohamed Mahmoud

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Ma, G., Ge, C. & Zhou, L. Achieving reliable timestamp in the bitcoin platform. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 13, 2251–2259 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-020-00905-6

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