Delegating Bilinear Pairings: Systematization, Amortized Efficiency, and Future Directions

Licentiate thesis, 2026

Bilinear pairings are a fundamental tool in cryptography but computationally expensive when being run on resource-constrained devices, making delegation or outsourcing to a server a desirable alternative. However, designing a protocol that simultaneously verifies the server's output correctness and achieves efficiency over local computation has been a longstanding open problem. This thesis provides a systematization of existing work in this line of research, introduces the novel concepts of amortized efficiency and sequential delegation, and proposes new protocols that achieve significant and concrete efficiency gains for the first time in the literature.