In the past five years, bilinear pairings have been used to design ingenious protocols for such tasks as identity-based encryption and group signatures. Suitable bilinear pairings can be constructed from the Weil and Tate pairing for specially chosen elliptic curves. An introduction will be given to the protocols, parameter selection, and security issues.

Pre-requisites: Basic knowledge of public-key cryptography, finite fields, and elliptic curves, for example as covered in Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6 of Neal Koblitz's book "A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography."