Paper 2025/528

VeRange: Verification-efficient Zero-knowledge Range Arguments with Transparent Setup for Blockchain Applications and More

Yue Zhou, Australian National University
Sid Chi-Kin Chau, CSIRO Data61
Abstract

Zero-knowledge range arguments are a fundamental cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to convince a verifier of the knowledge of a secret value lying within a predefined range. They have been utilized in diverse applications, such as confidential transactions, proofs of solvency and anonymous credentials. Range arguments with a transparent setup dispense with any trusted setup to eliminate security backdoor and enhance transparency. They are increasingly deployed in diverse decentralized applications on blockchains. One of the major concerns of practical deployment of range arguments on blockchains is the incurred gas cost and high computational overhead associated with blockchain miners. Hence, it is crucial to optimize the verification efficiency in range arguments to alleviate the deployment cost on blockchains and other decentralized platforms. In this paper, we present VeRange with several new zero-knowledge range arguments in the discrete logarithm setting, requiring only group exponentiations for verification, where is the number of bits to represent a range and is a small constant, making them concretely efficient for blockchain deployment with a very low gas cost. Furthermore, VeRange is aggregable, allowing a prover to simultaneously prove range arguments in a single argument, requiring only group exponentiations for verification. We deployed {\tt VeRange} on Ethereum and measured the empirical gas cost, achieving the fastest verification runtime and the lowest gas cost among the discrete-logarithm-based range arguments in practice.

Note: This is an extended version of the conference paper in AsiaCCS‘25

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. ACM AsiaCCS '25
Keywords
Zero-knowledge Range ArgumentTransparent SetupBlockchain
Contact author(s)
sid chau @ acm org
History
2025-03-23: approved
2025-03-21: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/528
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/528,
      author = {Yue Zhou and Sid Chi-Kin Chau},
      title = {{VeRange}: Verification-efficient Zero-knowledge Range Arguments with Transparent Setup for Blockchain Applications and More},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/528},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/528}
}
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