An Embedded Processor for a Pairing-Based Cryptosystem

In recent times bilinear pairings have been instrumental in the design of many new cryptographic protocols and have provided elegant solutions to existing protocol problems. The ç pairing is one such pairing and is an efficient computation technique based on a generalization of the Duursma Lee method for calculating the Tate pairing. The pairing can be computed very efficiently on genus 2 hyperelliptic curves. In this paper it is demonstrated that this pairing operation is well suited to a dedicated parallel hardware implementation on an FPGA. An ç pairing processor is described in detail and the architectures required for such a system are discussed. Prototype implementation results are presented over a base field of F_2^103 and the advantages of implementing the pairing on the dedicated processor are discussed