LAUSR

Abstract The majority of methods for constructing pairing-friendly elliptic curves are based on representing the curve parameters as polynomial families. There are three such types, namely complete, complete with variable discriminant and sparse families. In this paper, we present a method for constructing sparse families and produce examples of this type that have not previously appeared in the literature, for various embedding degrees. We provide numerical examples obtained by these sparse families, considering for the first time the effect of the recent progress on the tower number field sieve (TNFS) method for solving the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) in finite field extensions of composite degree.