Efficient Implementation of Pedersen Commitments Using Twisted Edwards Curves

Cryptographic commitment schemes are used in many contexts, whereby the size of the secret data and the security requirements depend on the target application. Using a software library that has been designed for other purposes (e.g., key-exchange or digital signatures) to compute commitments can be complicated or inefficient. We present in this paper a flexible implementation of Pedersen commitments based on elliptic curves in twisted Edwards form. The implementation supports a set of five curves of varying cryptographic strength, which are defined over 127, 159, 191, 223, and 255-bit pseudo-Mersenne prime fields. One can dynamically (i.e., at runtime) choose one of the curves according to the required level of security, and it is also possible to adapt to the size of the data to be committed by varying the number of base points. The point arithmetic is performed with optimized formulas using extended coordinates and dynamically pre-computed tables are utilized to speed up the scalar multiplication. Our implementation is written in ANSI C (with optional x86 assembler optimizations for the field arithmetic) and was compiled and tested successfully with Visual C on Windows, gcc on Linux, and clang on macOS. We present detailed benchmarking results for the field and point arithmetic on all five curves. When using an Intel Core i7 processor clocked at 2.7 GHz as test platform, we can compute more than 38,000 commitments per second on a twisted Edwards curve over a 127-bit field.