Certificateless cryptography

Certificateless cryptography is a variant of ID-based cryptography intended to prevent the key escrow problem. Ordinarily, keys are generated by a certificate authority or a key generation center (KGC) who is given complete power and is implicitly trusted. To prevent a complete breakdown of the system in the case of a compromised KGC, the key generation process is split between the KGC and the user. The KGC first generates a key pair, where the private key is now the partial private key of the system. The remainder of the key is a random value generated by the user, and is never revealed to anyone, not even the KGC. All cryptographic operations by the user are performed by using a complete private key which involves both the KGC's partial key, and the user's random secret value. Certificateless cryptography is a variant of ID-based cryptography intended to prevent the key escrow problem. Ordinarily, keys are generated by a certificate authority or a key generation center (KGC) who is given complete power and is implicitly trusted. To prevent a complete breakdown of the system in the case of a compromised KGC, the key generation process is split between the KGC and the user. The KGC first generates a key pair, where the private key is now the partial private key of the system. The remainder of the key is a random value generated by the user, and is never revealed to anyone, not even the KGC. All cryptographic operations by the user are performed by using a complete private key which involves both the KGC's partial key, and the user's random secret value.