The Pairing-Based Cryptography Library

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Ben Lynn’s PhD Dissertation

My dissertation, "On the Implementation of Pairing-Based Cryptography" is available here in PostScript and PDF formats:

My thesis contains an overview of elliptic curves, pairings, and the algorithms used to implement them, many of which are used by the PBC library.

Unfortunately, due to time pressure it is not as comprehensive as I’d like, and is probably missing some references. I apologize to anyone I’ve inadvertently omitted.

The above versions differ slightly from the copies available from Stanford because of minor edits and corrections.

See also my mathematics and cryptography notes.

Acknowledgements

Thanks of course to Dan Boneh, my adviser, and the rest of the reading committee, John Mitchell and Xavier Boyen. Thanks to Michael Cheng for sending me many corrections and comments on an early draft.

One of the toughest parts of a PhD is getting a PhD defence committee in the same time in the same place. Thanks to everyone who took time from their busy schedules to make it: Dan Boneh, Xavier Boyen, Serge Plotkin, Tim Roughgarden, and most of all John Gill, who agreed to chair the committee on short notice despite being relatively removed from my field. Thanks also to Ante Derek for suggesting I ask John Gill in the first place.

Many thanks to each of my paper co-authors through my PhD: Dan Boneh, Hovav Shacham, Paulo Barreto, Mike Scott, Hae Y. Kim, Guido Appenzeller, Craig Gentry, Jeremy Horwitz, Manoj Prabhakaran and Amit Sahai. Especially Paulo and Mike: I could swear in at least one of our publications I hardly contributed anything yet they insisted on including me as a co-author!

My gratitude goes to those who helped out with my code.

I’ve never been good with administrative details: filling out forms, ensuring I’m abiding by Stanford laws, INS laws, IRS laws, etc. Thanks to the Stanford CS Department staff for warning me when I was about to screw things up, and for helping me out when I inevitably screwed things up: Sondra Horn, Lynda Harris, Kathi DiTommaso, Jam Kiattinant, Verna Wong, Anastasia Haymore, and everyone else behind the scenes making real life easier for grad students.

If I left someone out by mistake, please let me know.