  Distortion maps are a useful tool for pairing based cryptography. Compared
with elliptic curves, the case of hyperelliptic curves of genus g > 1 is more
complicated since the full torsion subgroup has rank 2g. In this paper we prove
that distortion maps always exist for supersingular curves of genus g>1 and we
construct distortion maps in genus 2 (for embedding degrees 4,5,6 and 12).
