Towards Zero (Knowledge): Pairing-based Cryptography using CIRCL

There are a few companies I have a good deal of time for. IBM is one company who have existed as a leader for over 100 years, and their research work on cryptography has shown them to be a world-leader. Their work on Hyperledger, too, has shown their leadership in the field. Another company I highly respect for their approach to cryptography is Cloudflare.

As an active user of Cloudflare’s product — which helps proxy Web requests to my site — I can see they have a strong leadership in Web-based security. But, it is their strive to improve cryptography, and especially around the TLS handshake, that I admire them the most. They thus contribute to the advancement of technology and share their developments. As part of this they have developed an excellent cryptography library known as CIRCL (Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library) and which uses the Golang language. One of the more recent additions is the integration of pairing-based cryptography, and which is used extensively within private preserving methods, such as in zk-Snarks.

Pairing-based cryptography

I am fascinated by cryptography pairing (pairing-friendly curve cryptography) within elliptic curves, and the potential it gives for signing, anonymisation and zero-knowledge proofs. So let’s show…