There's a plugin for checking it in maven ( http://www.simplify4u.org/pgpverify-maven-plugin/plugin-info... ) that allows pinning the keys.
Ranges are rare but I'm not sure why - maven actually has very good support for them. I guess it's just that they're not the default?
In one of my old projects (bitcoinj) we did write a Maven plugin that let you put the hashes of the dependencies into your build file.
However it's rare to see Maven/Gradle builds that accept version ranges. And once downloaded it's cached.