New directions in identity based cryptography

Dr. Udaya Parampalli 2007

Identity or Identifier (ID) based cryptography is a fairly recent idea used to build public key infrastructure (PKI) for computer network applications. The main motivation is to avoid large infrastructure and associated costs of previous traditional public key methods, and to simplify the management. As the name suggests, in Identifier based systems, the public key can be constructed from information which represents identity such as email addresses. Hence this method minimizes the use of public directories.

While ID-based systems have lot of potential for minimizing cost, they retain two problems associated with earlier schemes: the first is private keys have to be sent by a key generator to users, raising a security issue in the transfer; the second is that if a key is compromised, we need a secure and efficient scheme for revoking it. The first problem of key escrow property of Identity based cryptography is the main impediment in its widespread usage in practice.

In this talk I talk about our recent experience in building Identity based primitives like encryption, signature and signcryption assuring added security. The specific key escrow nature of Identity based cryptography, often demands strong assurances from security perspective. I also present some applications of Identity based cryptography in Evoting protocols.

About Dr. Udaya Parampalli

Udaya Parampalli is a Senior Lecturer at at the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, of the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests are in the area of cryptography and sequences over finite fields and rings for communications and information security. More information about him can be obtained at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~udaya