IBE Applied to Privacy and Identity Mangement

Identifier-based Encryption (IBE) is an emerging cryptography schema. As it happens for new technologies, there are ongoing debates about its usefulness and best usage. This paper describes some practical applications of IBE, in the areas of confidentiality enforcement, privacy and identity management. These applications include: a service for timed release of confidential information; a secure role-based messaging service enforcing flexible privacy constraints; mechanisms to underpin an accountable management of identity and profile information. For each of the above applications we analyse the advantages provided by IBE against traditional cryptography and we discuss open issues.