ANALYZING ZERO-KNOWLEDGE PROOF PROTOCOLS FOR PRIVACY-PRESERVING DATABASE QUERY VERIFICATION

Abstract

The increasing need of data security in the distributed and cloud computing systems has led to the need to develop strong cryptography and cryptography checks that can help in testing the integrity of computations without revealing the underlying data. The research paper has analyzed Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocols, namely, zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs, and Bulletproofs with reference to privacy-friendly database query verification. The researchers used a systematic qualitative-analytical review involving forty-seven peer-reviewed articles found in ePrint archives of IEEE, ACM, and IACR to analyze the theoretical frameworks, performance indicators, and actual implementation issues of these protocols. The evaluation was done by judging each protocol based on its realization with respect to criteria such as computational efficiency, proof size, verification time, and formal security properties such as completeness, soundness and zero-knowledge properties. It was found that zk-SNARKs had compact proofs and could be verified quickly, but at the cost of having a trusted setup, leading to vulnerabilities. zk-STARKs were more transparent but had increased proof sizes. Bulletproofs exhibited significant range proof without trusted preparation. The research determined that there was no one protocol that best met all the database verification needs, and context-driven protocols selection was still a critical step towards the best privacy-preserving implementations.