ID-based cryptography

Identity-based cryptography is a type of public-key cryptography in which a publicly known string representing an individual or organization is used as a public key. The public string could include an email address, domain name, or a physical IP address.

The first implementation of identity-based signatures and an email-address based public-key infrastructure (PKI) was developed by Adi Shamir in 1984^[1], which allowed users to verify digital signatures using only public information such as the user's identifier. Under Shamir's scheme, a trusted third party would deliver the private key to the user after verification of the user's identity, with verification essentially the same as that required for issuing a certificate in a typical PKI.

Shamir similarly proposed identity-based encryption, which appeared particularly attractive since there was no need to acquire an identity's public key prior to encryption. However, he was unable to come up with a concrete solution, and identity-based encryption remained an open problem for many years. The first practical implementation was finally devised by Boneh and Franklin in 2001.^[2]

Usage[]

Identity-based systems allow any party to generate a public key from a known identity value such as an ASCII string. A trusted third party, called the private key generator (PKG), generates the corresponding private keys. To operate, the PKG first publishes a master public key, and retains the corresponding master private key (referred to as master key). Given the master public key, any party can compute a public key corresponding to the identity ID by combining the master public key with the identity value. To obtain a corresponding private key, the party authorized to use the identity ID contacts the PKG, which uses the master private key to generate the private key for identity ID.

See also[]

• ID-based encryption

References[]

fr:Schéma basé sur l'identité ko:신원 기반 암호 ja:IDベース暗号