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, ) 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 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 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 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. 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.