Research on XML-Based Key Management Service for Identity-Based Cryptography

Research on the certificate-less public key cryptography has been widely concerned recently. Identity-based cryptography, viz.IBE, is the most successful certificate-less solution. It can employ an arbitrary ID of a user as her public key, while as the user may request her private key from the key generation center named PKG. However, study on the trusted web service for IBE key management still has not appeared. In this paper, the differences between PKI and IBE are firstly analyzed, and the potentials of building XKMS for IBE are discussed. Then an XKMS-friendly service named IBE-XKMS is proposed, and various key management services are described in detail. Besides the basic XKMS services, IBE-XKMS also provides Envelope and Signature service, which can be utilized to develop IBE-enabled applications with Zero Code on client. At last, evaluations on the service performance and communication cost are conducted, comparing with that of PKI-based XKMS.