The MIRACL of IBE Signatures
As I look back over the year, I think my main “finds” have been the Go programming language and the MIRACL pairing library. Using these things, I have been able to bring alive abstract concepts and prove them. So, let’s take an example of illustrating the power of Go and MIRACL using a signing process in IBE (Identity Based Encryption).
With IBE rather than using a public key for Bob, we use something about Bob ID to create the public key. Bob then has a secret that he can use to generate the private key associated with this public key. In this article, we will use something simple, such as Bob’s email address. In this way, anyone who knows Bob’s ID will be able to encrypt something for him, but only he will be able to decrypt it. But what happens when Bob wants to sign for a message with IBE? Well, we will investigate in this article.
Signatures with IBE
First we have two curves (G1 and G2) and initially, we define a large prime number (q). Bob first selects a point on the G2 curve (P). First, a trust server selects a point on the G2 curve (P), and generates Bob secret key using a random number (s):
sk=s
Next the trust server creates Bob public key with:
Ppub=sP
