Wonderboom -- Efficient, and Censorship-Resilient Signature Aggregation for Million Scale Consensus

TL;DR

Wonderboom is a novel signature aggregation protocol designed for Ethereum that enables efficient, secure aggregation of millions of validators' signatures within a single slot, significantly improving speed and security.

Contribution

It introduces the first million-scale aggregation protocol that is faster and more secure than existing Ethereum protocols.

Findings

Wonderboom can aggregate and verify over 2 million signatures within a single Ethereum slot.

It is approximately 32 times faster than previous protocols.

The protocol offers enhanced security guarantees against adversarial attacks.

Abstract

Over the last years, Ethereum has evolved into a public platform that safeguards the savings of hundreds of millions of people and secures more than $650 billion in assets, placing it among the top 25 stock exchanges worldwide in market capitalization, ahead of Singapore, Mexico, and Thailand. As such, the performance and security of the Ethereum blockchain are not only of theoretical interest, but also carry significant global economic implications. At the time of writing, the Ethereum platform is collectively secured by almost one million validators highlighting its decentralized nature and underlining its economic security guarantees. However, due to this large validator set, the protocol takes around 15 minutes to finalize a block which is prohibitively slow for many real world applications. This delay is largely driven by the cost of aggregating and disseminating signatures across a validator set of this scale. Furthermore, as we show in this paper, the existing protocol that is used to aggregate and disseminate the signatures has several shortcomings that can be exploited by adversaries to shift stake proportion from honest to adversarial nodes. In this paper, we introduce Wonderboom, the first million scale aggregation protocol that can efficiently aggregate the signatures of millions of validators in a single Ethereum slot (x32 faster) while offering higher security guarantees than the state of the art protocol used in Ethereum. Furthermore, to evaluate Wonderboom, we implement the first simulation tool that can simulate such a protocol on the million scale and show that even in the worst case Wonderboom can aggregate and verify more than 2 million signatures within a single Ethereum slot.