A computational benchmark of standardized lattice-based post-quantum signature schemes

Abstract

This article provides an expanded computational evaluation of three standardized lattice-based post-quantum signature schemes—ML-DSA-44, ML-DSA-65 and Falcon-512—using reference implementations from the Open Quantum Safe (liboqs) project. Unlike prior benchmarking efforts that rely on optimized implementations or hardware-specific tuning, this work focuses on reproducible baseline performance on a conventional CPU platform. We measure key generation, signing and verification times across 5,000 iterations and analyze the effect of message length on signing cost. Results confirm that ML-DSA variants achieve significantly faster signing and key generation, whereas Falcon-512 produces substantially smaller keys and signatures. The study further highlights the computational dominance of lattice operations over hashing, explaining the weak dependence of signing cost on message size. These findings aim to support system architects evaluating the practical feasibility of standardized post-quantum signature algorithms.