International Association
for Cryptologic Research

<p>For more than two decades, pairings have been a fundamental tool for designing elegant cryptosystems, varying from digital signature schemes to more complex privacy-preserving constructions. However, the advancement of quantum computing threatens to undermine public-key cryptography. Concretely, it is widely accepted that a future large-scale quantum computer would be capable to break any public-key cryptosystem used today, rendering today's public-key cryptography obsolete and mandating the transition to quantum-safe cryptographic solutions. This necessity is enforced by numerous recognized government bodies around the world, including NIST which initiated the first open competition in standardizing post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic schemes, focusing primarily on digital signatures and key encapsulation/public-key encryption schemes. Despite the current efforts in standardizing PQ primitives, the landscape of complex, privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols, e.g., zkSNARKs/zkSTARKs, is at an early stage. Existing solutions suffer from various disadvantages in terms of efficiency and compactness and in addition, they need to undergo the required scrutiny to gain the necessary trust in the academic and industrial domains. Therefore, it is believed that the migration to purely quantum-safe cryptography would require an intermediate step where current classically secure protocols and quantum-safe solutions will co-exist. This is enforced by the report of the Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite version 2.0, mandating transition to quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms by 2033 and suggesting to incorporate ECC at 192-bit security in the meantime. To this end, the present paper aims at providing a comprehensive study on pairings at 192-bit security level. We start with an exhaustive review in the literature to search for all possible recommendations of such pairing constructions, from which we extract the most promising candidates in terms of efficiency and security, with respect to the advanced Special TNFS attacks. Our analysis is focused, not only on the pairing computation itself, but on additional operations that are relevant in pairing-based applications, such as hashing to pairing groups, cofactor clearing and subgroup membership testing. We implement all functionalities of the most promising candidates within the RELIC cryptographic toolkit in order to identify the most efficient pairing implementation at 192-bit security and provide extensive experimental results. </p>

At CANS'20, El Housni and Guillevic introduced a new 2-chain of pairing-friendly elliptic curves for recursive zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) made of the former BLS12-377 curve (a Barreto--Lynn--Scott curve over a 377-bit prime field) and the new BW6-761 curve (a Brezing--Weng curve of embedding degree 6 over a 761-bit prime field). First we generalise the curve construction, the pairing formulas ($e \colon \G_1 \times \G_2 \to \G_T$) and the group operations to any BW6 curve defined on top of any BLS12 curve, forming a family of 2-chain pairing-friendly curves. Second, we investigate other possible 2-chain families made on top of the BLS12 and BLS24 curves. We compare BW6 to Cocks--Pinch curves of higher embedding degrees 8 and 12 (CP8, CP12) at the 128-bit security level. We derive formulas for efficient optimal ate and optimal Tate pairings on our new CP curves. We show that for both BLS12 and BLS24, the BW6 construction always gives the fastest pairing and curve arithmetic compared to Cocks-Pinch curves. Finally, we suggest a short list of curves suitable for Groth16 and KZG-based universal SNARKs and present an optimized implementation of these curves. Based on Groth16 and PlonK (a KZG-based SNARK) implementations in the \texttt{gnark} ecosystem, we obtain that the BLS12-377/BW6-761 pair is optimized for the former while the BLS24-315/BW6-672 pair is optimized for the latter.

There have been notable improvements in discrete logarithm computations in finite fields since 2015 and the introduction of the Tower Number Field Sieve algorithm (TNFS) for extension fields. The Special TNFS is very efficient in finite fields that are target groups of pairings on elliptic curves, where the characteristic is special (e.g. sparse). The key sizes for pairings should be increased, and alternative pairing-friendly curves can be considered. We revisit the Special variant of TNFS for pairing-friendly curves. In this case the characteristic is given by a polynomial of moderate degree (between 4 and 38) and tiny coefficients, evaluated at an integer (a seed). We present a polynomial selection with a new practical trade-off between degree and coefficient size. As a consequence, the security of curves computed by Barbulescu, El Mrabet and Ghammam in 2019 should be revised: we obtain a smaller estimated cost of STNFS for all curves except BLS12 and BN. To obtain TNFS-secure curves, we reconsider the Brezing–Weng generic construction of families of pairing-friendly curves and estimate the cost of our new Special TNFS algorithm for these curves. This improves on the work of Fotiadis and Konstantinou, Fotiadis and Martindale, and Barbulescu, El Mrabet and Ghammam. We obtain a short-list of interesting families of curves that are resistant to the Special TNFS algorithm, of embedding degrees 10 to 16 for the 128-bit security level. We conclude that at the 128-bit security level, BLS-12 and Fotiadis–Konstantinou–Martindale curves with $$k=12$$ over a 440 to 448-bit prime field seem to be the best choice for pairing efficiency. We also give hints at the 192-bit security level.

We report on two new records: the factorization of RSA-240, a 795-bit number, and a discrete logarithm computation over a 795-bit prime field. Previous records were the factorization of RSA-768 in 2009 and a 768-bit discrete logarithm computation in 2016. Our two computations at the 795-bit level were done using the same hardware and software, and show that computing a discrete logarithm is not much harder than a factorization of the same size. Moreover, thanks to algorithmic variants and well-chosen parameters, our computations were significantly less expensive than anticipated based on previous records. The last page of this paper also reports on the factorization of RSA-250.