Identity-based encryption
type of public-key encryption
Identity-based encryption (IBE), is an important primitive of identity-based cryptography. As such it is a type of public-key encryption in which the public key of a user is some unique information about the identity of the user (e.g. a user's email address). This means that a sender who has access to the public parameters of the system can encrypt a message using e.g. the text-value of the receiver's name or email address as a key. The receiver obtains its decryption key from a central authority, which needs to be trusted as it generates secret keys for every user.
Identity-based encryption was proposed by Adi Shamir in 1984. He was however only able to give an instantiation of identity-based signatures. Identity-based encryption remained an open problem for many years.
The pairing-based Boneh–Franklin scheme and Cocks's encryption scheme based on quadratic residues both solved the IBE problem in 2001.
“Identity-based encryption” enters the record as type of public-key encryption. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Identity-based, encryption and type can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17081451. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Identity-based encryption” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.