Back in late February, I thought it would be kinda cool to introduce PQC algorithms to Le’Sec, and started writing an oqs plugin, based on liboqs, the same library that the OQS provider for OpenSSL is based on.
The intention was to see how they would compare, and if they would be able to interact with each other, at least with command line calls. I cannot recall how much such testing I did, and it has yet to be automated well enough.
However, back in March, I thought it would be fun to do some speed measurements, and compare.
… and lo’ and behold, it looks like using the oqs plugin with
lesec-speed is faster than using the OQS provider with openssl speed. In most cases, the difference is just a few percent, but for
key generation, Le’Sec as a whole performs up to about 20% faster than
OpenSSL.
I’ve written down the data for the speed test, including how I built the OQS provider and the oqs plugin, available through any seed on the Radicle network, for example:
https://seed.le-pri.me/raw/rad:z3YPUm18qR9o93MRErz7dCNuMSus4/head/speed/README.org
Feel free to try and see if you can reproduce it.
Note: the build instructions are only for liboqs, OQS provider
and oqs plugin. You will also need the OpenSSL command line tool
openssl for the provider, and you will have to build Le’Sec Core,
Le’Sec Plugin and Le’Sec App