[Cryptography] Why human-readable IDs (was Re: Email and IM are ideal candidates for mix networks)

[Jerry Leichter]

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 leichter at lrw.com 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