Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper highlights the common mistakes in applying pairing-based cryptography, reviews recent issues, and provides clear, updated guidelines to ensure secure and efficient use of pairings in cryptographic protocols.

Contribution

It offers an accessible, comprehensive set of criteria and best practices for the correct application of pairing-based cryptography, addressing recent misconceptions and errors.

Findings

Many recent applications misuse pairings, leading to insecure or inefficient protocols.

A review of recent papers reveals widespread incorrect assumptions about pairing security.

Provides an up-to-date, practical recipe for correct pairing usage in cryptography.

Abstract

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.