Handel: Practical Multi-Signature Aggregation for Large Byzantine Committees

Abstract

We present Handel, a Byzantine-tolerant aggregation protocol that allows for the quick aggregation of cryptographic signatures over a WAN. Handel has polylogarithmic time, communication and processing complexity. We implemented Handel as an open source Go library with a flexible design to support any associative and commutative aggregation function. We tested Handel on 2000 AWS instances running two nodes per instance and located in 10 AWS regions. The 4000 signatures are aggregated in less than 900 milliseconds with an average per-node communication cost of 56KB.