A different take on the problem: Would something built around identify-based
encryption help here? It sounds very tempting: My email address (or any other
string - say a bitmap of a picture of me) *is* my public key. The problem is
that it requires a central server that implicitly has access to my private key.
There are some proposals around to work around that (e.g., by constructing the
key from a combination of keys from different key generators). But we could go
another route: I can run a key generator on my own hardware. That doesn't
quite solve the problem, since you now need a secure way to find my key
generator - any generator will happily tell you how to encrypt using
[email protected] to generate the public key, and *it* will have the
corresponding private key.
I don't quite see how to make this work, but IBE seems like a primitive that
might be helpful, somehow.
-- Jerry
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