Recently, research on identity-based encryption (IBE) has received extensive attentions. Different from the traditional public-key cryptosystem, IBE applies the user’s identity directly as a public key rather than the digital certificate, and the key management is simple, which makes the IBE become a research hotspot in the field of public-key encryption. Nowadays, IBE is often constructed using bilinear pairing on elliptic curve. But the multiplication and exponential operations based on bilinear group are slow and inefficient, and the parameters selection is too complicated. Therefore, the IBE constructed based on bilinear pairing is not practical. The standard large integer factorization of the traditional public-key cryptosystem is better, which is the other direction for the construction of a safe and practical IBE. This paper describes the research progress of the IBE based on large integer factorization, introduces the definition and the security model of the IBE, and summarizes current research achievements on the IBE. This paper also compares and analyzes several typical IBE algorithms based on large integer factorization, and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm. In addition, this paper analyzes the hot issues of IBE, and puts forward some valuable problems for further research.