Faster pairings using an elliptic curve with an efficient endomorphism

The most significant pairing-based cryptographic protocol to be proposed so far is undoubtedly the Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) protocol of Boneh and Franklin. In their paper [6] they give details of how their scheme might be implemented in practice on certain supersingular elliptic curves of prime characteristic. They also point out that the scheme could as easily be implemented on certain special nonsupersingular curves for the same level of security. An obvious question to be answered is - which is most efficient? Motivated by the work of Gallant, Lambert and Vanstone [14] we demonstrate that, perhaps counter to intuition, certain ordinary curves closely related to the supersingular curves originally recommended by Boneh and Franklin, provide better performance. We illustrate our technique by implementing the fastest pairing algorithm to date (on elliptic curves over fields of prime characteristic) for contemporary levels of security, albeit on a rather particular class of curves. We also point out that many of the non-supersingular families of curves recently discovered and proposed for use in pairing-based cryptography can also benefit (to an extent) from the same technique.