PQC benchmarking

Intro/relevance

The emergence of quantum computers, which will be able to break a part of our current day cryptography in the future, necessitates companies to consider migrating their cryptography. However, even when the organisation has determined which cryptography to migrate, organisations are hesitant to start migration due to:

• Lack of hands-on migration experience
• Unknown impact of the migration (performance wise)

Project Proposal

We aim to remove this uncertainty and motivate to act now, by benchmarking common corporate systems, choosing systems which are: very commonly used, high throughput, low resource or critical building blocks of organisations. We want to show what the performance impact will be in practice, and share migration experience so that others will have a smooth and well-informed migration.

Expected benefits of the PQC benchmarking project?

• Concrete migration experience
• Data on performance impact of PQC vs current cryptography, for real systems
• An overview where PQC might not be a suitable alternative

Why do we want to work on this idea within the PCSI?

The partners together represent a good and diverse intersection of real world systems that will be impacted, including high performance network components, SCADA, health care systems, and financial systems.

Activities in POC phase

• Doing the first PQC migration on a system of ABN AMRO
• Taking the lessons learned to improve the benchmarks in the Pilot phase
• Determining suitable use cases to migrate and benchmark at ASML, ING, Achmea and Belastingdienst.

The fictional image above is created with the use of Midjourney