The bilinear pairings are considered as the key enabler for many novel cryptographic protocols, such as three-party one round DH[1], shorter signatures and certificateless (ID-based) crypto[3] , which employ Tate and Weil pairings. Lots of promising research and progress has been made in the last decade, and the pairing concept has been hyped quite a bit.
However, there are also some sources claiming that pairings are "useless", for example this article from 2015: On the Disadvantages of Pairing-based Cryptography from university of Shanghai.
As a summary, the article claims that BPC (Bilinear pairing crypto) doesn't bring any advantage, and in fact requires significantly large key sizes. But the article only seems to consider Tate and Weil pairings, and only the short signature protocol.
Also, I haven't somehow found much new research or progress about current situation of pairing concepts from the past 5 years. I assume that at least pairings utilizing Tate and Weil are obsolete, as Ate and optimal Ate over BN-curves have turned out to be much more efficient.
So finally my question is: Are the bilinear pairings still considered useful, and what are the main advantages? I have assumed that they are so far the only way to implement protocols such as ID-based cryptography.
Sources:
A. Joux, (2000) “A one round protocol for tripartite Diffie-Hellman”
D. Boneh and M. Franklin,(2001) “Identity-based encryption from the Weil pairing”