PQC-LEO: An Evaluation Framework for Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithms

TL;DR

This paper presents PQC-LEO, a benchmarking framework for evaluating the performance of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms on different hardware architectures, aiding their adoption and comparison.

Contribution

The paper introduces PQC-LEO, a novel automated benchmarking framework for assessing PQC algorithms' performance on x86 and ARM architectures.

Findings

Higher security PQC algorithms show greater performance reduction on ARM.

The framework effectively supports research in PQC adoption.

Demonstrated the framework's capability through a proof-of-concept evaluation.

Abstract

Advances in quantum computing threaten digital communication security by undermining the foundations of current public-key cryptography through Shor's quantum algorithm. This has driven the development of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), a new set of algorithms resistant to quantum attacks. While NIST has standardised several PQC schemes, challenges remain in their adoption. This paper introduces the PQC-LEO framework, a benchmarking suite designed to automate the evaluation of PQC computational and networking performance across x86 and ARM architectures. A proof-of-concept evaluation was conducted to demonstrate the framework's capabilities and highlight its application in supporting ongoing research on the adoption of PQC algorithms. The results show that there is a greater performance reduction in implementing PQC methods with higher security on ARM architectures than on the x86 architecture.