Domain-based administration of identity-based cryptosystems for secure email and IPSEC

Abstract

Effective widespread deployment of cryptographic technologies such as secure email and IPsec has been hampered by the difficulties involved in establishing a large scale public key infrastructure, or PKI. Identity-based cryptography (IBC) can be used to ameliorate some of this problem. However, current approaches to using IBC for email or IPsec require a global, trusted key distribution center. In this paper, we present DNSIBC, a system that captures many of the advantages of using IBC, without requiring a global trust infrastructure. The resulting system can be configured to require almost no user intervention to secure both email and IP-based network traffic. We have built a preliminary implementation of this system in Linux.