Energy Efficiency Analysis of Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithms

Classical cryptographic schemes in use today are based on the difficulty of certain number theoretic problems. Security is guaranteed by the fact that the computational work required to break the core mechanisms of these schemes on a conventional computer is infeasible; however, the difficulty of these problems would not withstand the computational power of a large-scale quantum computer. To this end, the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization process initiated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is well underway. In addition to the evaluation criteria provided by NIST, the energy consumption of these candidate algorithms is also an important criterion to consider due to the use of battery-operated devices, high-performance computing environments where energy costs are critical, as well as in the interest of green computing. In this paper, the energy consumption of PQC candidates is evaluated on an Intel Core i7-6700 CPU using PAPI, the Performance API. The energy measurements are categorized based on their proposed security level and cryptographic functionality. The results are then further subdivided based on the underlying mechanism used in order to identify the most energy-efficient schemes. Lastly, IgProf is used to identify the most energy-consuming subroutines within a select number of submissions to highlight potential areas for optimization.