Why Can’t I Use My ID As My Public Key?
Meet Crypto Pairing and Identity Based Encryption (IBE)
Pair-based cryptography can do no wrong just now, and is often at the core of many of the current advances in privacy, zero-knowledge proof and multi-party computation. You will find it in signature aggregation — and where we can take many signers and create a single signature from their public keys — and in privacy-preserving methods.
Identity-based Encryption (IBE) is an alternative to PKI, and involves generating the encryption key from a piece of identity for the recipient. For example we could use the email address of the recipient to generate the key for a destination.
For this we have some shared parameters with a trust center that both Bob and Alice trust. If Alice wants to send Bob an email, she takes the parameters from the trust center, and then uses Bob’s email address to generate his public key:
When Bob receives the encrypted email, he contacts the trust center and the center generates the private key required to decrypt the email.
