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Beyond Public Key Encryption


One of the saddest and most fascinating things about applied cryptography is how little cryptography we actually use. This is not to say that cryptography isn’t widely used in industry &#8212…

Mallory.Solving this problem — of exchanging public keys and verifying their provenance — has motivated a huge amount of practical cryptographic engineering, including the entire web PKI. First, Cocks’ IBE scheme does not require bilinear pairings at all — it is based in the much older RSA setting, which means in principle it spent all those years just waiting to be found. The basic idea is to represent the decryption procedure as an algorithm that computes an arbitary function F over (1) the plaintext inside of a ciphertext, and (2) the data embedded in the key.

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