Performance Metrics Guide - crt26/pqc-evaluation-tools GitHub Wiki

Guide Overview

This guide provides an overview of the performance metrics collected by the project's automated benchmarking tools for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms using the Open Quantum Safe project. It outlines the types of performance data gathered, how results are structured and parsed, and links to detailed documentation for each benchmarking category.

The benchmarking framework evaluates both computational performance of cryptographic operations (using Liboqs) and protocol-level performance within TLS 1.3 (using the OQS-Provider integration with OpenSSL).

Topics Covered

This section of the wiki is split into three focused pages, separating core cryptographic concepts from the implementation-specific performance metrics collected through automated testing.

• PQC Cryptographic Operations:
  Provides a concise overview of the fundamental operations used in PQC algorithms, including key generation, signing, verification, encapsulation, and decapsulation. This serves as a reference for understanding the performance metrics described in the other sections.

• PQC Computational Performance Metrics:
  Covers CPU and memory benchmarking of PQC operations using the Liboqs test suite. It explains the collected metrics, the tools used, and how both raw and parsed result files are stored and structured.

• PQC TLS Performance Metrics:
  Describes how PQC and Hybrid-PQC algorithms perform within real-world TLS 1.3 handshakes and cryptographic operations using OpenSSL and the OQS-Provider. This section also outlines how these results are organised and interpreted.