Bandersnatch

Bandersnatch is an elliptic curve defined over the field GF(p) where p is the BLS12-381 curve subgroup order. It can be represented in Twisted Edwards form a*x**2 + y**2 = 1 + d * x**2 * y**2 where:

p = 0x73eda753299d7d483339d80809a1d80553bda402fffe5bfeffffffff00000001
a = -5
d = 0x6389c12633c267cbc66e3bf86be3b6d8cb66677177e54f92b369f2f5188d58e7

How we obtained Bandersnatch

We looked for small discriminant curves defined over the prime field of characteristic p above. The command

$ make curvesearch

outputs the possible ordinary curves for D < 389 (see small-disc-curves.txt for the output). Bandersnatch is the one of these curves that fits very well for cryptographic applications: it has a subgroup of 253-bit order r.

# Curver order
 2^2 * 13108968793781547619861935127046491459309155893440570251786403306729687672801

# Quadratic twist order
 2^7 * 3^3 * 15172417585395309745210573063711216967055694857434315578142854216712503379

Efficient Scalar multiplication

Bandersnatch has j=8000 and -D=-8, meaning that it has a fast endomorphism psi = sqrt(-2) leading to an efficient GLV scalar multiplication algorithm on the subgroup of order r. We provide three models in order to describe our curve, together with the coefficients for computing this endomorphism. Three files (python-ref-impl/params-W.py, python-ref-impl/params-M.py and python-ref-impl/params-TE.py) can be generated using

make getparams

• In affine Weierstrass coordinates.
  The file python-ref-impl/params-W.py contains the curve parameters p, a, b such that the Weierstrass equation of the curve over GF(p) is y**2 = x**3 + a*x + b. It also includes the coefficients r0,r1,s0,t0,t1,u2,u3 such that

psi_W(x,y) = ( u2*((x+r1)*x+r0)/(x+s0) , u3*y*((x+t1)*x+t0)/(x+s0)**2 )

• In projective x-z Montgomery coordinates.
  The file python-ref-impl/params-M.py includes the parameters of the Montgomery curve B*y**2 = x**3 + A*x**2 + x over GF(p), together with the coefficient c for the endomorphism in projective x-z coordinates:

psi_M(x,z) = ( -(x-z)**2 - c * x * z , 2 * x * z )

• In projective Twisted Edwards coordinates.
  The file python-ref-impl/params-TE.py includes the parameters of the curve in the form a*x**2 + y**2 = 1 + d * x**2 * y**2, and the endomorphism coefficients b,c such that

psi_TE(x,y,z) = ( c*(z**2-y**2)*(y**2-b*z**2), b*(y**2+b*z**2)*x*y, (y**2-b*z**2)*x*y )

Comparison with Jubjub

We implemented a non-optimized elliptic curve group law arithmetic in python-ref-impl/curve.py and python-ref-impl/bandersnatch.py. Our benchmarks lead to a Bandersnatch scalar multiplication ~35% faster than on Jubjub. This estimation can be reproducible using

$ make bench

and our code can be tested using

$ make test

We also provide Rust benchmarks, where we obtained a 42% improvement. TODO coming soon.

Technical details

We are writing a paper for more technical details. It is still a work in progress, available using

make pdf
evince paper/bandersnatch.pdf

Reference implementation

We provide two reference implementations

• python
• rust