The tower number field sieve

Abstract

The security of pairing-based crypto-systems relies on the difficulty to compute discrete logarithms in finite fields Fpn where n is a small integer larger than 1. The state-of-art algorithm is the number field sieve (NFS) together with its many variants. When p has a special form (SNFS), as in many pairings constructions, NFS has a faster variant due to Joux and Pierrot. We present a new NFS variant for SNFS computations, which is better for some cryptographically relevant cases, according to a precise comparison of norm sizes. The new algorithm is an adaptation of Schirokauer’s variant of NFS based on tower extensions, for which we give a middlebrow presentation.