Cryptographic keys generation using identity

Public key cryptography is a fundamental and widely used technology around the world for secure information exchange over Internet. Public key cryptography uses public key of the receiver to encrypt the message and receiver uses his/her private key to decrypt the message. Public key of receiver is known publicly, prior to the communication. Hence the authentication of the public key is a big challenge and for which public key certificates, provided by Certification Authority (CA), are used. At large scale communication to set up numerous CA"s is a major overhead of public key cryptography. Hence this paper attempts to avoid the use of public key certificates and proposes an RSA based algorithm to generate the cryptographic keys using identity such as E-Mail ID of a person. The algorithm uses a hash function to generate the keys. The simulation results for key generation using various hash functions are also shown in paper.