Performance Evaluation for a Post-Quantum Public-Key Cryptosystem

Quantum Computing threatens security of today’s systems. Confidence in today’s security technologies largely relies on Public Key Cryptography (PKC), which depends on computational difficulty of mathematical problems that cannot be solved efficiently using any technology available today. This will, however, change once a sufficiently capable quantum computer will become available. Similarly, security of symmetric crypto algorithms will also be substantially weakened. Current progress in research proves that Quantum Computing is no longer science fiction. Hence, research and development of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms that can withstand attacks in Quantum Computing era are of paramount importance. This paper complements existing research in this domain with a performance analysis of a post-quantum cryptosystem capable of encrypting and decrypting messages either bit-wise or string-wise. Specifically, we describe a workflow for implementing the scheme, design a reproducible hardware performance evaluation testbed for an IoT and an online shopping scenario, define performance metrics, and perform performance evaluation case studies. Our performance analysis shows that bit-wise encryption and decryption and the corresponding key generation fits resource-constrained IoT microcontrollers as well as on average laptops. The encryption and decryption of a bit each take less than 30 ms and the key generation less than 300 ms.