Paper 2015/084 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2015/084 ↗
On the Disadvantages of Pairing-based Cryptography
Abstract
Pairing-based cryptography (PBC) has many elegant properties. It is claimed that PBC can offer a desired security level with smaller parameters as the general elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In the note, we remark that this view is misleading. Suppose that an elliptic curve E is defined over the field F_q. Then ECC is working with elements which are defined over F_q. But PBC is working with the functions and elements defined over F_{q^k}, where k is the embedding degree. The security of PBC depends directly on the intractable level of either elliptic curve discrete log problem (ECDLP) in the group E(F_q) or discrete log problem (DLP) in the group F_{q^k}^*. That means PBC protocols have to work in a running environment with parameters of 1024 bits so as to offer 80 bits security level. The shortcoming makes PBC lose its competitive advantages significantly.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Foundations
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2015-02-15: last updated
- 2015-02-14: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2015/084
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/084,
author = {Zhengjun Cao and Lihua Liu},
title = {On the Disadvantages of Pairing-based Cryptography},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/084},
year = {2015},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/084}
}