Usability of pairing-based cryptography on smartphones

This paper deals with the usability of pairing-based cryptography on smartphones. Pairing-based cryptographic schemes can offer many advanced cryptographic primitives such as privacy protection, identity-based encryption and so on. These schemes are used to secure services and applications that may run on hand-held devices. Nevertheless, pairing operations are more expensive than modular arithmetic operations that are used in conventional cryptographic schemes. In this work, we investigate the performance of pairing operations on current smartphones. Then, we implement and evaluate a pairing-based group signature scheme on smartphones. Further, we show optimization techniques that can reduce expensive pairing operations in pairing-based schemes. Our results help to clarify whether these schemes are suitable to run on current smartphones.