{"slug": "energy-consumption-of-post-quantum-cryptography-on-constrained-and-general", "title": "Energy Consumption of Post-Quantum Cryptography on Constrained and General-Purpose Architectures", "summary": "A benchmark study of the three NIST-standardised post-quantum cryptography algorithms found that SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) signing costs up to 243% more energy on 32-bit devices than on equivalent 64-bit hardware, making it impractical for resource-limited IoT deployments. The study measured key generation, signing and verification for ML-KEM (FIPS 203), ML-DSA (FIPS 204) and SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) on 32-bit Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero boards, 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4 hardware and commodity laptops, using an FNIRSI FNB58 USB power meter and OpenSSL 3.5. ML-KEM and ML-DSA matched classical elliptic-curve cryptography in energy and speed across all tested architectures, the study reported, as US, UK and EU governments mandate migration to quantum-resistant standards.", "body_md": "With Q-day approaching, the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has begun, with governments across the US, UK and EU mandating migration to quantum-resistant standards. This paper benchmarks the three NIST-standardised PQC algorithms—FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA) and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA)—across key generation, signing and verification operations, measuring both computational performance and energy consumption on a range of constrained IoT-class devices, from the 32-bit Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero to the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4, as well as commodity laptop hardware. Using the FNIRSI FNB58 USB power meter and OpenSSL 3.5, results show that ML-KEM and ML-DSA achieve energy and speed efficiency comparable to classical elliptic-curve cryptography across all tested architectures. However, SLH-DSA signing is inadvisable on constrained hardware: energy costs for SLH-DSA signing on 32-bit devices were up to 243% higher than on equivalent 64-bit hardware, making it impractical for resource-limited IoT deployments. These findings have direct implications for IoT security practitioners planning PQC migration.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/energy-consumption-of-post-quantum-cryptography-on-constrained-and-general", "canonical_source": "https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2557", "published_at": "2026-10-19 18:25:51+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-20 15:18:34.561335+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["NIST", "ML-KEM", "ML-DSA", "SLH-DSA", "Raspberry Pi", "OpenSSL", "FNIRSI"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/energy-consumption-of-post-quantum-cryptography-on-constrained-and-general", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/energy-consumption-of-post-quantum-cryptography-on-constrained-and-general.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/energy-consumption-of-post-quantum-cryptography-on-constrained-and-general.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/energy-consumption-of-post-quantum-cryptography-on-constrained-and-general.jsonld"}}