jPBC: Java pairing based cryptography

It has been recently discovered that some cyclic groups that could be used in Cryptography admit a special bilinear pairing map that introduces extra structure to the group. Bilinear pairing maps were first used to break cryptosystems (see, for example, [1], [2], [3]) and later it was realized that the extra structure could be exploited to build cryptosystems with extra properties. Boneh and Franklins identity-based encryption scheme [4] is the most famous early example of what could be achieved using bilinear maps. After that, a plethora of cryptosystems have been designed using bilinear maps. No full and freely available implementation of pairing based cryptography was available until this work. Recent proposals [13], [14], [15] fall short of this goal as either their source code is not available or because they support a limited range of elliptic curve. Moreover, neither one of [13], [14], [15] implements preprocessing that is crucial to reduce the computation time. In this work, we present jPBC a Java port of the PBC library written in C [24], [25]. jPBC provides a full ecosystem of interfaces and classes to simplify the use of the bilinear maps even for a non-cryptographer. jPBC supports different types of elliptic curves, preprocessing which can speedup the computation significantly and it is ready for the mobile world. Moreover a benchmark comparison between jPBC and PBC has been performed to measure the gap between the two libraries. Furthermore jPBC has been benchmarked on different Android mobile platforms.