Hi List,
In follow up to
my previous thread about SLH-DSA performance optimization, I published a short new article directly comparing the signature verification throughput of my highly-parallelized SLH-DSA verification shader code against libsecp256k1, mostly to answer some questions I'd received from Ethan Heilman.
The results were very surprising to me. The benchmarks seem to show SLH-DSA can perform about as well under load as a naive single-threaded BIP340 schnorr signature verifier, if properly optimized.
If the BIP340 verifier is parallelized as well, SLH-DSA compares much less favorably, but still within a single order of magnitude.
Bear in mind I only benchmarked a single (slower) SLH-DSA parameter set, and I used the NIST FIPS-205 algorithm, without any aftermarket add-ons like WOTS+C or FORS+C which would've sped up verification even more (see Jonas and Mikhail's paper,
ref this thread). I also did not benchmark BIP340 batch verification as I have seen
its effects are mild compared to parallelism.
regards,
conduition