Performance and Memory Characterization of NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Workloads

• Saulo M. Z. Freitas PUC Minas
• Henrique C. Freitas PUC Minas
• Matheus A. Souza PUC Minas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sscad.2026.34356

Resumo

The advancement of quantum computing threatens widely used public-key cryptography, motivating the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms selected by NIST for standardization. This work characterizes ML-KEM, ML-DSA, FN-DSA, SLH-DSA, and HQC using the liboqs library, evaluating execution time, key and signature sizes, stack and heap usage, sensitivity to 16 compilation configurations of the benchmark harness, and scalability with message size. ML-KEM is two to three orders of magnitude faster than HQC, ML-DSA offers the most balanced signature performance, and stack usage varies by up to 21× across families while heap peaks differ by at most 47 KiB. For large messages, signing and verification costs converge to the SHAKE-256 throughput, and harness compilation flags show no consistent effect. These results support algorithm selection across deployment scenarios.

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