Batch Signatures, Revisited

We revisit batch signatures (previously considered in a draft RFC, and used in multiple recent works), where a single, potentially expensive, "inner" digital signature authenticates a Merkle tree constructed from many messages. We formalise a construction and prove its unforgeability and privacy properties.

We also show that batch signing allows us to scale slow signing algorithms, such as those recently selected for standardisation as part of NIST's post-quantum project, to high throughput, with a mild increase in latency. For the example of Falcon-512 in TLS, we can increase the amount of connections per second by a factor 3.2x, at the cost of an increase in the signature size by ~14% and the median latency by ~25%, where both are ran on the same 30 core server.

We also discuss applications where batch signatures allow us to increase throughput and to save bandwidth. For example, again for Falcon-512, once one batch signature is available, the additional bandwidth for each of the remaining N-1 is only 82 bytes.