LayerZero Unveils Aerie for Quantum-Safe Signatures

LayerZero Labs has introduced Aerie, a research system that developers say can aggregate 32,768 quantum-resistant Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds on an Apple laptop without GPU acceleration. According to CryptoNews, the Oct. 16 announcement identifies researchers from LayerZero, a16z crypto research, Carnegie Mellon University, and Imperial College London as contributors to the project, which builds upon the Akita cryptographic proof system.

Performance and Benchmarks

In benchmarks conducted on an Apple M4 Max using 16 worker threads, Aerie processed the Falcon-512 batch with a peak memory usage of 2.1 GiB. A second workload comprising 16,384 Falcon-1024 signatures took 0.63 seconds with similar memory requirements. Producing a proof for either workload took roughly 4.3 seconds when restricted to a single thread.

The research paper notes that checking the completed Falcon-512 aggregate took 54 milliseconds on one core, compared with 519 milliseconds for checking the signatures individually. With 16 threads, those figures dropped to 11.6 milliseconds and 42.9 milliseconds, respectively.

Signature Data and Comparison

Aerie retains a short random value, or salt, from each signature so verifiers can calculate associated hashes directly. For the 32,768-signature Falcon-512 workload, the aggregate measures 1,346 KiB including salts and headers, with the proof component accounting for approximately 66 KiB.

Compared to Orthus, an earlier Falcon aggregation system, the team reports 1.5 times faster proof generation, 38 times faster verification, and proofs 1.7 times smaller on the same server. Against Ethereum's hash-based leanVM work, Aerie achieved 29 times leanVM's XMSS throughput under comparable conditions, though leanVM proofs verified faster in single-thread configurations.

Key facts

• LayerZero Labs introduced Aerie to aggregate 32,768 quantum-resistant Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds.
• The benchmark was achieved on an Apple M4 Max using 16 worker threads without GPU acceleration.
• Contributors include researchers from LayerZero, a16z crypto research, Carnegie Mellon University, and Imperial College London.
• Aerie’s standard aggregate measures 42.1 bytes per signature, approximately 16 times smaller than padded Falcon signatures.