What is Trusted Authority

The concept of Identity Based Cryptography introduced the idea of using arbitrary strings such as e-mail addresses and IP Addresses to form public keys with the corresponding private keys being created by the Trusted Authority(TA) who is in possession of a system-wide master secret. Then a party, Alice who wants to send encrypted communication to Bob need only Bob's identifier and the system-wide public parameters. Thus the receiver is able to choose and manipulate the public key of the intended recipient which has a number of advantages. While IBC removes the problem of trust in the public key, it introduces trust in the TA. As the TA uses the system-wide master secret to compute private keys for users in the system, it can effectively recompute a private key for any arbitrary string without having to archive private keys. This greatly simplifies key management as the TA simply needs to protect its master secret.