Project Overview - crt26/PQC-LEO GitHub Wiki

Project's Purpose

PQC-LEO (PQC-Library Evaluation Operator) provides an automated and comprehensive evaluation framework for benchmarking Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms. It is designed for researchers and developers looking to evaluate the feasibility of integrating PQC into their environments. The framework streamlines the setup and testing of PQC implementations, enabling the collection of computational and networking performance metrics across x86 and ARM systems through a suite of dedicated automation scripts. Furthermore, the framework supports energy usage testing of PQC algorithms using supported energy meters, providing insights into the energy efficiency of these algorithms in real-world scenarios.

PQC implementations are sourced from multiple libraries, including algorithms natively supported in OpenSSL 4.0.3 and those available from the Open Quantum Safe (OQS) project's Liboqs and OQS-Provider libraries. PQC-LEO supports automated TLS handshake testing over loopback or physical networks, TLS handshake transmission cost testing, and energy measurement tools that capture power usage during both computational and TLS benchmarks. Performance and energy results are output as raw CSV and text files and automatically parsed into structured metrics and averages, while transmission cost tests produce structured CSV files directly.

Future versions of the project aim to support additional PQC libraries, further expanding the scope of supported benchmarking.

Project Features

  • Verifying and installing required system packages and Python PIP dependencies.

  • Compiling and configuring the OpenSSL, OQS, and ARM PMU dependency libraries.

  • Collecting PQC computational performance data, including CPU and peak memory usage metrics, using the Liboqs library.

  • Gathering networking performance data for PQC schemes integrated into the TLS 1.3 protocol using the PQC support available natively in OpenSSL 4.0.3 and via the OQS-Provider.

  • Measuring the transmission cost of one-way and mutually authenticated TLS 1.3 handshakes across PQC, Hybrid-PQC, and classical configurations.

  • Coordinated PQC TLS handshake tests run over the loopback interface or across physical networks between a server and client device.

  • Measuring energy consumption for computational and TLS benchmarks using supported energy meters and collection environments.

  • Automatic or manual parsing of raw performance data, including calculating averages across multiple test runs.

Project Development

For details on the project's development and upcoming features, see the project's GitHub Projects page:

PQC-LEO Project Page

Citation and Academic Use

If using PQC-LEO within academic research or publication, please cite the following paper which formally introduces the framework:

@inproceedings{turino2025pqc,
  title={PQC-LEO: An Evaluation Framework for Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithms},
  author={Turino, Callum and Buchanan, William J and Lo, Owen and Th{\"u}mmler, Christoph},
  booktitle={2025 IEEE 7th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (TPS-ISA)},
  pages={237--247},
  year={2025},
  organization={IEEE}
}

Paper DOI: 10.1109/TPS-ISA67132.2025.00033

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