I’m a part of the team that is building and supporting Sarcophagus a project on Ethereum that is aimed at leveraging a Decentralized Dead Man’s switch to share digital secrets to a desired recipient. The secrets can be any type of digital media/file. We invite anyone to take a look at how our protocol works, the cryptography scheme leveraged, and to help provide feedback. Our website is: https://sarcophagus.io
We’ve tried to design the solution general enough to be able to handle multiple use cases such as:
- Password Recovery
- Estate Planning / Will & Trust
- Whistle Blower Activities
- Lock Savings Account/Escrow-like Services
Many of the modern crypto-based solutions either require a person and/or company/entity to manage the “secret” and we’ve designed an incentivized network of nodes to manage it and it can be thought of as “incentivized” recovery, unlike social recovery.
Basic steps of how the protocol works:
- End User uploads digital data and sets a timer for the data to be released
- They choose an on-chain Ethereum recipient (ie another wallet)
- Data is encrypted by the pubkey of the recipient and uploaded onto Arweave for permanent storage
- the tx hash of the data can then be split to be safeguarded by an m of n scheme (via Shamirs Secret Sharing) of nodes who store their shared keys to the data until the timer the end user set goes off.
- End user can always modify the duration of their payload (or sarcophagus) with an additional transaction
- Nodes are paid a bonded fee for executing and releasing the sarcophagus at the right time or will be slashed of their fees.
- Recipient has access to the sarcophagus after this
We’re working on supporting additional UI/UX enhancements and migration to L2s for minimizing network/tx fees that are on ETH mainnet. Would love to get feedback about this in any form!