Trusted Generation of Public Keys — Based on Your Identity
In 1984, Adi Shamir proposed an alterative to PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) [here][1]:
Identity-based Encryption (IBE) involves generating the encryption key from a piece of identity for the recipient, and considerabley simplied the method of generating public keys. For this, instead of getting public keys from digital certificates, we could use the email address of the recipient to generate the key for an entity.
For this, we have some shared parameters with a trust centre that both Bob and Alice trust. If Alice wants to send Bob an email, she takes the parameters from the trust centre, and then uses Bob’s email address to generate his public key:
When Bob receives the encrypted email, he contacts the trust centre and the centre generates the private key required to decrypt the email. So let’s look at a method that allows Bob to generate Alice’s public key, in a trusted way.
