Nigel’s Vision: Authenticated Key Exchange With Identity Based Encryption

One of the great visionaries in cryptography is Nigel Smart, and who moved from the University of Bristol to KU Leuven in 2018. Nigel has been a real visionary within many areas including Identity Based Encryption (IBE), homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation (MPC), and crypto pairing.

With IBE, we use a KGC (Key Generation Centre) in order to share a secret between Bob and Alice (s) and publish a public key of sP (and where P is a generator point on an elliptic curve).

Bob then uses something about Alice’s ID to generate her public key, and Alice does the same for Bob. If Alice creates a secret (a), and Bob creates a secret (b), they can then end up with the same shared key in a matter similar to the Diffie-Hellman method, but which uses crypto pairs. One of his classic papers for this is [here]:

The paper looks rather unusual these days, as it only had one author, and does not contain pages and pages of proofs. The references, too, are fairly simple in their scope, and that abstract is just a couple of lines lone. But it is a wonderful paper, and focuses on the key contributions, rather than…