Self-certified public keys

Abstract

We introduce the notion, and give two examples, of self-certified public keys, i.e. public keys which need not be accompanied with a separate certificate to be authenticated by other users. The tick is that the public key is computed by both the authority and the user, so that the certificate is “embedded” in the public key itself, and therefore does not take the form of a separate value. Self-certified public keys contribute to reduce the amount of storage and computations in public key schemes, while secret keys are still chosen by the user himself and remain unknown to the authority. This makes the difference with identity-based schemes, in which there are no more certificates at all, but at the cost that secret keys are computed (and therefore known to) the authority.