A flexible role-based secure messaging service: exploiting IBE technology for privacy in health care

The management of private and confidential information is a major problem for dynamic organizations. Secure solutions are needed to exchange confidential documents, protect them against unauthorized accesses and cope with changes of people´s roles and permissions. Traditional cryptographic systems and PKI show their limitations, in terms of flexibility and manageability. This paper describes an innovative technical solution in the area of secure messaging that exploits identifier-based encryption (IBE) technology. It illustrates the advantages against a similar approach based on traditional cryptography and PKI. It discusses a few open issues. Our main contribution is a practical solutions based on IBE technology. A secure messaging system based on IBE has been fully implemented and it is currently used in a trial with a UK health service organization.