Performance Evaluation of TLS 1.3 Handshake on Resource-Constrained Devices Using NIST's Third Round Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanisms and Digital Signatures

Abstract

Towards the end of the 20. century, quantum computing came into sight by the main effect of Shor's Algorithm. While this algorithm offers a solution for the factorization problem, which makes it exponentially faster, it alongside becomes a critical threat for the encryption schemes since mostly their security mechanisms rely on the difficulty of integer factorization or discrete log problems. Despite it is not known when advanced quantum computers will show up, yet, once it is developed, most existing cryptography will be rendered useless, which means all existing information security will be vulnerable. Owing to this risky situation, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization process for the development of PQC schemes. In this paper, we have chosen three key encapsulation mechanisms and two digital signature algorithms with different parameter sets from the round three submissions. We measured their TLS 1.3 handshake performance using two resource-constrained devices and compared it to that of classical encryption and digital signature schemes. Experiment results showed that post-quantum algorithms come with an extra message overhead while their handshake delay values are promising.