An Optimized Pairing-Based Cryptography Library for Android

There are numerous pairing-based cryptography (PBC) libraries available for desktop-based applications. However, these libraries are mostly not compatible or not optimized for mobile phone operating systems (OS) such as Android. In this paper, we show the inconsistency on benchmarking result for Java-based PBC libraries between Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM). Identifying the root cause, we present a new PBC library for Android, namely, mobile-PBC (mPBC) which combines the strengths of several Java PBC libraries and optimized for Android’s DVM. The mPBC library outperforms the existing Java-based PBC libraries in DVM, yet as efficient as the fastest PBC library to date in the JVM. In particular, the pre-processed Tate pairing operation in mPBC uses 426.11ms in DVM (Samsung GT-N7000) and 4.50ms in JVM (Sager NP5160).