Giacomo Pope

Last month I was lucky enough to attend Eurocrypt 2023, which took place in Lyon, France. It was my first chance to attend an academic cryptography conference and the experience sat somewhere in between the familiar cryptography of the Real World Crypto conference and the abstract world of black holes…

Editor’s note: since the publication of this blog post, an expanded and more technical discussion of the implementation process has been written, and is available on eprint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1283. Introduction Last weekend (July 30th) a truly incredible piece of mathematical/cryptanalysis research was put onto eprint. Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru of KU…

The use of pairings in cryptography began in 1993, when an algorithm developed by Menezes, Okamoto and Vanstone, now known as the MOV-attack, described a sub-exponential algorithm for solving the discrete logarithm problem for supersingular elliptic curves. It wasn’t until the following decade that efficient pairing-based algorithms were used constructively…