Voltage Security Identity-Based Encryption

Information Encryption for Email, Files, Documents and Databases

Fundamentally, the reason to use encryption is to protect data so that only a specific person (for example, bob@b.com) or a machine (for example, www.voltage.com) can access it. However, until now, encryption techniques have relied on long, randomly generated keys that must be mapped to identities using digitally-signed documents, called certificates. The management of these certificates, and the need to fetch a certificate before encrypting to a person or machine, has made encryption very difficult.

Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) takes a completely new approach to the problem of encryption. IBE can use any arbitrary string as a public key, enabling data to be protected without the need for certificates. Protection is provided by a key server that controls the mapping of identities to decryption keys.

The design of an Identity-Based Encryption system was a long-standing open problem in cryptography. Voltage now offers a platform based on the first secure, practical IBE system, the Boneh-Franklin IBE Algorithm.