Paper 2025/1174

Efficient Constant-Size Linkable Ring Signatures for Ad-Hoc Rings via Pairing-Based Set Membership Arguments

Min Xie, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen
Zhengzhou Tu, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen
Man Ho Au, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Junbin Fang, Jinan University
Xuan Wang, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong Key Laboratory of New Security and Intelligence Technology
Zoe Lin Jiang, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong Key Laboratory of New Security and Intelligence Technology
Abstract

Linkable Ring Signatures (LRS) allow users to anonymously sign messages on behalf of ad-hoc rings, while ensuring that multiple signatures from the same user can be linked. This feature makes LRS widely used in privacy-preserving applications like e-voting and e-cash. To scale to systems with large user groups, efficient schemes with short signatures and fast verification are essential. Recent works, such as DualDory (ESORICS’22) and LLRing (ESORICS’24), improve verification efficiency through offline precomputations but rely on static rings, limiting their applicability in ad-hoc ring scenarios. Similarly, constant-size ring signature schemes based on accumulators face the same limitation. In this paper, we propose a framework for constructing constant-size LRS suitable for large ad-hoc rings. We introduce a novel pairing-based Set Membership Argument (SMA) with a proof size of only three group elements. By leveraging KZG polynomial commitments, we optimize the verification to require only constant group exponentiations and pairings, as well as linear field multiplications. Utilizing the SMA, our framework achieves constant-size signatures with verification dominated by linear field operations, outperforming existing schemes that require linear group exponentiations in ad-hoc ring settings. Moreover, it exhibits strong scalability: (i) compatibility with any PKI-based cryptosystem and (ii) scoped linkability, enabling flexible definitions of linking scope. We instantiate our framework using a discrete logarithm public key structure. On the $BN254$ curve, our signature size is fixed at 687 bytes, which to our best knowledge is the shortest LRS for ring sizes larger than 32. For a ring size of 1024, our verification cost is only 10.4 ms, achieving 48.6×, 2.6×–467×, 7.9×–13.2×, and 2.2×–102.5× improvements over Omniring (CCS’19), DualDory (with and without precomputation), LLRing-DL (with and without precomputation), and LLRing-P (with and without precomputation), respectively. Moreover, this performance gap continues to grow as the ring size increases.

Note: This is the full version of the paper accepted to ACM CCS 2025.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. ACM CCS 2025
DOI
10.1145/3719027.3744830
Keywords
Linkable Ring SignaturesAd-hoc RingsSet Membership ArgumentsBlockchain
Contact author(s)
minxie @ stu hit edu cn
23S051021 @ stu hit edu cn
man-ho-allen au @ polyu edu hk
tjunbinfang @ jnu edu cn
wangxuan @ cs hitsz edu cn
zoeljiang @ hit edu cn
History
2025-11-24: last of 2 revisions
2025-06-20: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/1174
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1174,
      author = {Min Xie and Zhengzhou Tu and Man Ho Au and Junbin Fang and Xuan Wang and Zoe Lin Jiang},
      title = {Efficient Constant-Size Linkable Ring Signatures for Ad-Hoc Rings via Pairing-Based Set Membership Arguments},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1174},
      year = {2025},
      doi = {10.1145/3719027.3744830},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1174}
}
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