What Can Identity-Based Cryptography Offer to Web Services?

Web services are seen as the enabler of service-oriented computing, a promising next generation distributed computing technology. Independently, identity-based cryptography is emerging as a serious contender to more conventional certificate-based public key cryptography. However, the application of identity-based cryptography in web services appears largely unexplored. This paper sets out to examine how identity-based cryptography might be used to secure web services. We show that identity-based cryptography has some attractive properties which naturally suit the message-level security needed by web services.