Performance Analysis of NIST Standardized Post-Quantum Cryptography Algorithms in Resource-Constrained IoT Environments

Majority of the connections currently rely on traditional public-key cryptography infrastructures such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), but they face great jeopardy with threats lurking upon the horizon in the advent of quantum computing. Indeed, a powerful enough quantum computer would have the potential to overthrow such encryption technologies in a matter of other polynomial times through Shor's algorithm. As part of the new generation of protection mechanisms for combatting possible quantum-based risks, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed lattice-based algorithms called CRYSTALS-Dilithium for Digital Signatures and CRYSTALS-Kyber for Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM). However, deploying such computationally intensive algorithms upon IoT devices characterized as being significantly vulnerable in terms of capabilities in memory, computational power, and energy is considered to be a formidable challenge. In a paper, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms, as chosen by NIST, are thoroughly benchmarked, and their performance is evaluated in a simulated IoT environment. Our paper seeks to measure the performance of Kyber and Dilithium algorithms for limited hardware architectures at various security levels, NIST Level 1, 3, and 5, using the open-source library called liboqs. There are three parameters that have been studied in our paper: overhead in terms of communication, size of memory in terms of stack usage, and delay time. There are experimental results that show that Kyber-512 offers a good trade-off for security and latency, which is needed for real-time Internet of Things services, but more secure variants and digital signatures such as Dilithium have high latency that may have an impact on system performance, specifically for ultra-low-power devices. The operational hurdles for using PQC that is integrated into current Internet of Things protocols as well as optimization strategies for a smooth shift to a quantum-resistant Internet of Things environment are determined. Some of the index terms used in this article are: NIST Standardization, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), Internet of Things (IoT), CRYSTALS-Kyber, C