A Secure Synchronized Reading system over time-critical online contests

The time-critical online contest environment calls for an elegant and precise management system to start a contest online. The management system should simultaneously follow three rules of security that are confidentiality, anonymity and fairness. We present in this paper a novel system named Secure Synchronized Reading (SSR) system as well as its corresponding security model according to the three rules. SSR can evoke a synchronized start for all competitors in a contest at the intended time by employing a Randomness-reused Identity-Based Encryption (RIBE) scheme. It can avoid huge differences among delivery delays of heterogeneous competitors and any false start by an adverse competitor. Consequently when an online contest begins, the SSR system performs quasi real-time with ignorable communication delays in the security model. As a complement, the analysis on the provable security of SSR is given finally, as well as a further analysis on the achievement of synchronization.