Efficient Implementation of Bilinear Pairings on ARM Processors

As hardware capabilities increase, low-power devices such as smartphones represent a natural environment for the efficient implementation of cryptographic pairings. Few works in the literature have considered such platforms despite their growing importance in a post-PC world. In this paper, we investigate the efficient computation of the Optimal-Ate pairing over Barreto-Naehrig curves in software at different security levels on ARM processors. We exploit state-of-the-art techniques and propose new optimizations to speed up the computation in the tower field and curve arithmetic. In particular, we extend the concept of lazy reduction to inversion in extension fields, analyze an efficient alternative for the sparse multiplication used inside the Miller’s algorithm and reduce further the cost of point/line evaluation formulas in affine and projective homogeneous coordinates. In addition, we study the efficiency of using M-type sextic twists in the pairing computation and carry out a detailed comparison between affine and projective coordinate systems. Our implementations on various mass-market smartphones and tablets significantly improve the state-of-the-art of pairing computation on ARM-powered devices, outperforming by at least a factor of 3.7 the best previous results in the literature.