Certificateless cryptography is a variant of ID-based cryptography intended to prevent the key escrow problem. Only a partial private key is generated by the key generation center (KGC) and the other part of the private key is chosen by and only known to the user. An additional public key is generated by the user, which, however does not need to be certified by any trusted party.
Certificateless cryptography is a variant of ID-based cryptography intended to prevent the key escrow problem. Ordinarily, keys are generated by a certificate authority or a key generation center (KGC) who is given complete power and is implicitly trusted. To prevent a complete breakdown of the system in the case of a compromised KGC, the key generation process is split between the KGC and the user. The KGC first generates a key pair, where the private key is now the partial private key of the system. The remainder of the key is a random value generated by the user, and is never revealed to anyone, not even the KGC. All cryptographic operations by the user are performed by using a complete private key which involves both the KGC's partial key, and the user's random secret value.
