Generating pairing-friendly parameters for the CM construction of genus 2 curves over prime fields

We present two contributions in this paper. First, we give a quantitative analysis of the scarcity of pairing-friendly genus 2 curves. This result is an improvement relative to prior work which estimated the density of pairing-friendly genus 2 curves heuristically. Second, we present a method for generating pairing-friendly parameters for which ρ ≈ 8, where ρ is a measure of efficiency in pairing-based cryptography. This method works by solving a system of equations given in terms of coefficients of the Frobenius element. The algorithm is easy to understand and implement.