Time Lock – pq-vault.com

Time Locking

Time-locked access is a valuable feature for data protection. It restricts access to your data to a specific period of time.

You can for example set time-locked access for the following time-sensitive documents:

legal documents e.g. contracts, patent applications, etc.
financial statements e.g. invoices, bank transfers
personal data of employees, applicants

With PQVault, encryption can happens at any time. However, you may control when an encrypted data can be decrypted by following the following steps (it is assumed that you had already encrypted the data beforehand):

Set the share to have the policy of “DateNotBefore”, “DateNotAfter” or both
The share policy “DateNotBefore” specifies that the data can only be encrypted after the specified date
The share policy “DateNotAfter” specifies that the data can only be encrypted before the specified date
Combining both the above policies allows you to set a period of time at which the data can be accessed or decrypted
With the policies set, your resources under the configured share are now time-locked!

In some situations, secured data is required to be available only during a definite time period e.g. providing contracted workers company information for them to do their work. In this case, the access to the information can be set to expire after the contract for those workers end; preventing unauthorized access to your data and ensuring you that the access control of your data are always up-to-date.

Time-locked encrypted data are inherently more secure than normal encrypted data. This is because, in addition to a malicious actor needing to get access to decrypt your data, he/she is required to figure out when the data can be decrypted.

Not only that, adding a time lock to an encrypted data allows you to secure it far into the future without you regularly keeping an eye for it. For example, you can encrypt all confidential emails and files, then set the rights to decrypt to expire within a year. After a year, you may forget about the private emails and files, but a malicious actor may somehow have access to them e.g. your email account is compromised. However, he/she is unable to read their content due to the decryption rights having been expired.