International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)
Abstract
Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic cornerstone of privacy-preserving technologies such as Confidential Transactions (CT), which aims at hiding monetary amounts in cryptocurrency transactions. Due to its asymptotically logarithmic proof size and transparent setup, most state-of-the-art CT protocols use the Bulletproofs (BP) zero-knowledge proof system for set membership proofs such as range proofs. However, even taking into account recent efficiency improvements, BP comes with a serious overhead in terms of concrete proof size as well as verifier running time and thus puts a large burden on practical deployments of CT and its extensions.
In this work, we introduce Bulletproofs++ (BP++), a drop-in replacement for BP that improves its concrete efficiency and compactness significantly. As for BP, the security of BP++ relies only on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle model, and BP++ retains all features of Bulletproofs including transparent setup and support for proof aggregation, multi-party proving and batch verification. Asymptotically, BP++ range proofs require only O(n/logn) group scalar multiplications compared to O(n) for BP and BP+.
At the heart of our construction are novel techniques for permutation and set membership, which enable us to prove statements encoded as arithmetic circuits very efficiently. Concretely, a single BP++ range proof to establish that a committed value is in a 64-bit range (as commonly required by CT) is just 416 bytes over a 256-bit elliptic curve, 38\% smaller than an equivalent BP and 27\% smaller than BP+. When instantiated using the secp256k1 curve as used in Bitcoin, our benchmarks show that proving is about 5 times faster than BP and verification is about 3 times faster than BP. When aggregating 32 range proofs, proving and verification are about 9.5 times and 5.5 times faster, respectively