[Cryptography] New attacks on discrete logs?

[Samuel Neves]

On 05/22/2014 03:11 AM, Jonathan Katz wrote:
> On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 9:00 PM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:
>
>> I can't figure out from these two articles exactly what's been attacked.
>>  (It's not even clear to me if they are describing two *different*
>> attacks.)  Anyone been following the details?
>>
>> http://phys.org/news/2014-05-unassailable-encryption-algorithm-hours.html
>>
>> http://phys.org/news/2014-05-algorithm-cryptography.html
>>
> Best I can tell, the top article is talking about this paper:
>   http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/300
> but it's not clear to me what "family of algorithms presented as candidates
> for the next generation of encryption keys" the article is referring to.

The article links to this paper, http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.3668, which implies that the "next-generation cryptography"
here is pairing-based crypto in small characteristic.