Generic construction of certificateless encryption

Abstract

As the Internet becomes an indispensable element of modern life, PKC (Public Key Cryptography) is gaining a considerable attention because it can assure the security requirements of many applications. To guarantee the authenticity of public keys, traditional PKC requires certificates to be signed by a CA (Certification Authority). However, the management of infrastructure supporting certificates is the main complaint against traditional PKC. While identity-based PKC can eliminate this cumbersome infrastructure, the key escrow of a user's private key is inherent in identity-based PKC. Recently, a new PKC paradigm called the certificateless PKC was introduced. Certificateless PKC eliminates the need for unwieldy certificates and retains the desirable properties of identity-based PKC without the inherent key escrow problem. In this paper, we provide a generic secure construction of certificateless encryption. While previous schemes are based on the algebraic properties of bilinear mappings, our construction is built from general primitives. This result shows that certificateless encryption can be constructed in a more general way. © Springer-Verlag 2004.