Pairing based schemes have been designed for various applications that have certain advantages over conventional RSA or discrete logarithm based encryption schemes. The concept of pairing was first introduced by Andre Weil in 1940. It plays an important role in the theoretical study of the arithmetic of elliptic curves and Abelian varieties. A lot of pairing based schemes exist in literature but all cannot be implemented in practice due to security reasons. In the present paper we shall study different types of attacks on pairing based schemes