Pairing the volcano

Abstract

Isogeny volcanoes are graphs whose vertices are elliptic curves and whose edges are $\ell$-isogenies. Algorithms allowing to travel on these graphs were developed by Kohel in his thesis (1996) and later on, by Fouquet and Morain (2001). However, up to now, no method was known, to predict, before taking a step on the volcano, the direction of this step. Hence, in Kohel's and Fouquet-Morain algorithms, many steps are taken before choosing the right direction. In particular, ascending or horizontal isogenies are usually found using a trial-and-error approach. In this paper, we propose an alternative method that efficiently finds all points $P$ of order $\ell$ such that the subgroup generated by $P$ is the kernel of an horizontal or an ascending isogeny. In many cases, our method is faster than previous methods. This is an extended version of a paper published in the proceedings of ANTS 2010. In addition, we treat the case of 2-isogeny volcanoes and we derive from the group structure of the curve and the pairing a new invariant of the endomorphism class of an elliptic curve. Our benchmarks show that the resulting algorithm for endomorphism ring computation is faster than Kohel's method for computing the $\ell$-adic valuation of the conductor of the endomorphism ring for small $\ell$.