Radix-r Non-Adjacent Form and Its Application to Pairing-Based Cryptosystem*The preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 7th Information Security Conference (ISC 2004), held in Palo Alto.

Recently, the radix-3 representation of integers is used for the efficient implementation of pairing based cryptosystems. In this paper, we propose non-adjacent form of radix-r representation (rNAF) and efficient algorithms for generating rNAF. The number of non-trivial digits is (r - 2)(r + 1)/2 and its average density of non-zero digit is asymptotically (r - 1)/(2r - 1). For r = 3, the non-trivial digits are {± 2, ± 4} and the non-zero density is 0.4. We then investigate the width-w version of rNAF for the general radix-r representation, which is a natural extension of the width-w NAF. Finally we compare the proposed algorithms with the generalized NAF (gNAF) discussed by Joye and Yen. The proposed scheme requires a larger table but its non-zero density is smaller even for large radix. We explain that gNAF is a simple degeneration of rNAF---we can consider that rNAF is a canonical form for the radix-r representation. Therefore, rNAF is a good alternative to gNAF.