International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Embedded curves are elliptic curves defined over a prime field whose order (characteristic) is the prime subgroup order (the scalar field) of a pairing-friendly curve. Embedded curves have a large prime-order subgroup of cryptographic size but are not pairing-friendly themselves. Sanso and El Housni published families of embedded curves for BLS pairing-friendly curves. Their families are parameterized by polynomials, like families of pairing-friendly curves are. However their work did not found embedded families for KSS pairing-friendly curves. In this note we show how the problem of finding families of embedded curves is related to the problem of finding optimal formulas for $\mathbb{G}_1$ subgroup membership testing on the pairing-friendly curve side. Then we apply Smith's technique and Dai, Lin, Zhao, and Zhou criteria to obtain the formulas of embedded curves with KSS, and outline a generic algorithm for solving this problem in all cases. We provide two families of embedded curves for KSS18 and give examples of cryptographic size. We also suggest alternative embedded curves for BLS that have a seed of much lower Hamming weight than Sanso et al.~and much higher 2-valuation for fast FFT. In particular we highlight BLS12 curves which have a prime-order embedded curve that form a plain cycle (no pairing), and a second (plain) embedded curve in Montgomery form. A Brezing-Weng outer curve to have a pairing-friendly 2-chain is also possible like in the BLS12-377-BW6-761 construction. All curves have $j$-invariant 0 and an endomorphism for a faster arithmetic on the curve side.