Useful pairings for cryptography
That depends on the protocol being used, but most pairing-based protocols assume that the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) problem is hard: given $P, aP, bP, cP$ for group element $P$ and integers $a, b, c$ it is hard to compute $e(P, P)^{abc}$ for a given pairing $e$.

There are many related problems that, if broken, could be used to break the BDH: the discrete logarithm, the Computational Diffie-Hellman (given $P, aP, bP$ compute $abP$), etc.