Don't abandon all hope

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 3.9

Identity-based encryption, or IBE, is just one of the many steps in the evolution of public-key technology. It has some definite advantages over other public-key technologies in some situations. That's why there are over 10 million users of IBE worldwide today. On the other hand, understanding why IBE works is fairly difficult. As public-key technology has evolved it has used more and more complicated mathematics, and IBE is just the next step in this evolution. Whatever comes after IBE will probably use even more complicated math.

The RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes are the public-key schemes that were invented first. These aren't too difficult to understand. An undergraduate student in a technical subject probably has seen enough math to understand how they work. This means that there are probably millions of people worldwide who either understand these schemes or have the necessary background to understand them without too much effort.

Elliptic curve cryptography was probably the next major step in the evolution of public-key technology. It has some advantages over RSA and Diffie-Hellman, but it also relies on more difficult math. There are lots of people who understand enough to implement the technology, but there are relatively few people who really understand why it works. There are probably a few thousand people in the world with the necessary background for that. To the others who just want to implement it, it's just a "black box," and they trust that the algorithms that they implement make sense and do things in a secure way.

IBE builds on elliptic-curve cryptography and uses even more powerful mathematical machinery to do this. Unfortunately, using more and more powerful math also means that it's understandable to fewer and fewer people. It's even more of a "black box" that implementers tend to trust to do the right and secure thing. Voltage has lots of partners who use the Voltage IBE Toolkit to add IBE to their products, for example, but I don't think that any of them worry about exactly how the technology works or why it's secure. They're just interested in using the technology to solve their particular problems. There's a good reason why they don't need to worry about the security of IBE, and that's because there's a rigorous mathematical proof of its security.

As public-key technology became more and more complex, another change happened in the cryptographic community: proofs of security started becoming more and more common. Today, you'll almost never see a new public-key technology introduced without rigorous proofs of its security.  So if you're one of the vast majority of people who don't have the time or inclination to understand all of the details of how newer public-key technologies work and why they're safe to use, you don't have to abandon all hope. The proofs of security that are now commonplace should let you feel comfortable that the newer technologies are secure.