Monero Conducts First Successful Tests of its “Bulletproofs” Protocol
Privacy Coin Monero (XRM) effectively passed the first assessment for its new “bulletproofs” protocol.
Monero officials had announced in December 2017 that they planned to embed a bulletproof mechanism into the crypto’s protocol. They noted then that the bulletproof would result to “massive space savings, better verification times and lower fees.” The process was expected to occur in two phases and be accessible for the test network prior to its installation on the main Monero network.
Bulletproofs were suggested by Stanford’s Applied Cryptography Group (ACG) with contributions from the members of University College London and Blockstream. Bulletproofs are technologies used to determine proofs of zero-knowledge used by Zcash and some other cryptocurrencies.
For privacy coins including Monero, zero-knowledge proofs allow users to hide their transaction amounts from the public ledger. However, while its counterpart ‘Range proofs’ take a lot of space by the nature of its design, Bulletproofs allow users to carry out similar tasks with less space.
Monero stated in a blog post that the implementation led to an 80 percent drop in transaction size, and would eventually result to 80 percent drop in transaction fees. There have been series of debates in the Ethereum and Bitcoin communities regarding the likely integration of such a mechanism on those networks as well.
In a recent tweet, the Monero team announced that the first independent assessment, conducted by Kudelski Security was successfully completed.
The report went on to state that investigations have uncovered four likely security problems of low or undetermined severity and eight other observations connected to general code safety of the implementation. The bulletproof mechanism is now live on the Monero test network.
Two additional assessments by Benedikt Bünz, the co-author of the bulletproof paper and Quarkslab are expected to finish soon. The implementation is going to be integrated into the main network during the expected protocol upgrade of September/October.
