[Cryptography] How slow is pairing based crypto compared to 25519

[Christian Huitema]

On 2/6/2018 3:11 AM, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> The fastest library I can find for pairing based crypto is
> https://github.com/herumi/mcl
>
> How does this compare to Curve25519 https://github.com/bernedogit/amber
>
> The trouble is that doing interesting things with crypto currency
> tends to involve rather large number of elliptic curve operations per
> transaction.

There is a good discussion of the performance tradeoff for crypto and
IOT in this Internet Draft, currently in IETF last call:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-lwig-crypto-sensors/. Form
the abstract:

   This memo describes challenges associated with securing resource-
   constrained smart object devices.  The memo describes a possible
   deployment model where resource-constrained devices sign message
   objects, discusses the availability of cryptographic libraries for
   small devices and presents some preliminary experiences with those
   libraries for message signing on small devices.  Lastly, the memo
   discusses trade-offs involving different types of security
   approaches.

The draft contains measurement and evaluations of libraries, including herumi.

-- Christian Huitema