Performance analysis and deployment considerations of post-quantum cryptography for consumer Electronics
Daniel Commey, Benjamin Appiah, Griffith Selorm Klogo, Winful Bagyl-Bac, James Dzisi Gadze, Yousef S. Alsenani, Garth V. Crosby · Scientific Reports · 2026
Abstract Quantum computing threatens the security foundations of consumer electronics (CE). Preparing CE systems for the post-quantum transition requires quantitative evidence on the performance of standardized and selected post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This paper presents a cross-platform performance analysis of PQC key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and digital signature schemes against classical RSA/ECC baselines. We evaluate execution time and communication and storage overhead on two desktop-class reference platforms (macOS/M4 and Ubuntu/x86-64) and on a Raspberry Pi 4 platform used as a proxy for Linux-based gateway-class CE hubs and gateways. To establish a portable software baseline, the benchmark excludes vendor-specific hardware acceleration such as NEON and AVX. The results show that lattice-based schemes, especially ML-KEM and ML-DSA, provide a favorable measured combination of execution time and object size for gateway-class deployment. By contrast, Classic McEliece imposes large public-key sizes, while SPHINCS+ incurs large signatures despite its conservative hash-based design. Based on these measurements, we provide recommendations for gateway-class CE devices and identify open issues for deeper embedded platforms.