Core engineering and protocols for Secure Firmware Signing.
While SLH-DSA signatures are large, its public key is tiny: a mere 32 bytes (comprising the root hash PK.root and public seed PK.seed). In embedded silicon design, burning 32 bytes into hardware eFuses is trivial, allowing chipmakers to establish permanent, immutable hardware roots of trust during wafer manufacturing.
Verifying an SLH-DSA signature requires no complex polynomial vector multipliers, floating-point arithmetic, or large memory allocations: the verification algorithm consists purely of hashing byte arrays using SHA-256 or SHAKE-256. This simplicity enables provably correct, bug-free verification kernels that occupy less than 2 KB of silicon boot ROM code.