Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory, 3rd Edition

Chapter 22 Pairing-Based Cryptography

As we pointed out in the previous chapter, elliptic curves have various advantages in cryptosystems based on discrete logs. However, as we’ll see in this chapter, they also open up exciting new vistas for cryptographic applications. The existence of a bilinear pairing on certain elliptic curves is what makes this possible.

First, we’ll describe one of these pairings. Then we’ll give various applications, including identity-based encryption, digital signatures, and encrypted keyword searches.