[Resource Topic] 2024/1697: On pairing-friendly 2-cycles and SNARK-friendly 2-chains of elliptic curves containing a curve from a prime-order family

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Title:
On pairing-friendly 2-cycles and SNARK-friendly 2-chains of elliptic curves containing a curve from a prime-order family

Authors: Tomáš Novotný

Abstract:

Cryptographic protocols such as zkSNARKs use 2-cycles of elliptic curves for efficiency, often relying on pairing computations. However, 2-cycles of pairing-friendly curves are hard to find, and the only known cases consist of an MNT4 and an MNT6 curve. In this work, we prove that a 2-cycle containing an MNT3 curve cannot be pairing-friendly. For other curve families, we have a similar result for cryptographically attractive field sizes. Thus we cannot hope to find new pairing-friendly 2-cycles using the current methods.

Furthermore, we show that there are no SNARK-friendly 2-chains of elliptic curves from combinations of MNT, Freeman and BN curves of reasonable size, except for the (MNT4, MNT6) chains.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1697

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