Analytical Evaluation of Time-based Cryptography

Recent requirements for secure and timely applications have allowed considerable improvements in time-based cryptographic approaches (TBC) to represent the most critical step toward considering time as an essential factor in modern cryptographic protocols. This paper analyzes the performance and security of TLPs and VDFs, highlighting their trade-offs in efficiency and verifiability, focusing on time-lock puzzles (TLPs) and verifiable delay functions (VDFs). Among all TBC approaches, TLP and VDF are relevant in enforcing timed access and verifiable delay in secure systems due to their resistance against parallel computation and predictable delay. Additionally, we present the security analysis, computational efficiency, and implementation of TLP and VDF basic schemes with practical applications, showing that TLPs are simple but suffer from computation delays. In contrast, VDFs are computationally intensive to be evaluated but efficiently verifiable. Subsequently, we deliver recommenda tions, analysis, and prospective trend scenarios for assessing security analysis and complexity requirements.