A Low-Power Elliptic Curve Pairing Crypto-Processor for Secure Embedded Blockchain and Functional Encryption

Abstract

Pairing-based cryptography (PBC), a variant of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), uses bilinear maps between elliptic curves and finite fields to enable several novel applications beyond traditional key exchange and signatures [1]. Fig. 1 shows two such applications - (a) signature aggregation, where arbitrarily large number of signatures are aggregated into one to resolve communication bottleneck in mesh networks such as blockchain [9], and (b) functional encryption, which allows computation on encrypted data with a function embedded in the decryption key [7]. In particular, pairing-based function-hiding inner product functional encryption [10] can be used for privacy-preserving data classification, thus enabling a new paradigm in the field of secure computation.