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

Due to temporary access restrictions, embargoed data cannot be refreshed to unlimited parties during the embargo time interval. A solution to mitigate the risk of data loss has been developed that uses a data dissemination framework, the Timed-Locked Embargo Framework (TLEF), that allows data refreshing of encrypted instances of embargoed content in an open, unrestricted scholarly community. TLEF exploits implementations of existing technologies to "time-lock" data using timed-release cryptology so that TLEF can be deployed as digital resources encoded in a complex object format suitable for metadata harvesting. The framework successfully demonstrates dynamic record identification, time-lock puzzle encryption, encapsulation and dissemination as XML documents. We implement TLEF and provide a quantitative analysis of its successful data harvest of time-locked embargoed data with minimum time overhead without compromising data security and integrity.