The Pairing 2008 Conference was held at Royal Holloway, University of London during September 1-3, 2008. This conference followed on from the Pairing in Cryptography workshop (held in Dublin, Ireland on June 12-15, 2005) and the Pairing 2007 conference (held in Tokyo, Japan on July 2-4, 2007, with proce- ings published in Springer's LNCS 4575). The aim of this series of conferences is to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry, all concerned with problems related to pairing-based cryptography. The programme consisted of 3 invited talks and 20 contributed papers. The invitedspeakerswereXavierBoyen(VoltageSecurity, USA), FlorianHess(Te- nical University Berlin, Germany) and Nigel Smart (University of Bristol, UK). Special thanks are due to these speakers, all three of whom provided papers which are included in these proceedings. The contributed talks were selected from ?fty submissions. The accepted papers cover a range of topics in mathematics and computer science, including hardwareand softwareimplementation of pairings, cryptographicprotocols, and mathematical aspects and applications of pairings. We would like to thank all the people who helped with the conference p- gramme and organisation. First, we thank the Steering Committee for their guidance and suggestions. We also heartily thank the Programme Committee and the sub-reviewers listed on the following pages for their thoroughness d- ing the review process. Each paper was reviewed by at least three people and there was signi?cant online discussion about a number of papers.