Score:2

Is Falcon (PQ signing algorithm) slower than ECDSA in terms of computing time?

kp flag

FALCON is a cryptographic algorithm for digital signature, but is it slower than actuals algorithms (ECDSA)?

Score:5
ru flag

SUPERCOP is a good source of cryptographic benchmarks. For illustration, I've picked a specific CPU (Intel Skylake) and looked at the NIST level 1 (128-bit classical security) cycle counts for Curve25519, Falcon512 and Dilithium2 for good reason, at the median (50%) level. I used the AES version of Dilithium2 since it's representative of using hardware accelerated instructions for randomness.

Algorithm Key generation Sign 59 bytes Verify 59 bytes
ed25519 45,352 48,172 165,992
falcon512tree 20,349,783 406,207 78,329
dilithium2aes 48,760 140,947 61,640

It's worth noting that Curve25519 is the product of years of research into efficient implementations of elliptic-curve cryptography, whereas these figures for PQC schemes, if I'm not mistaken, come from the NIST submission from the designers themselves. Therefore, it is expected that this will improve over time. For instance, there's a recent paper by Thomas Pornin that significantly speeds up Falcon key generation.

poncho avatar
my flag
Nit: NIST level 1 is 128 bit classical security...
swineone avatar
ru flag
Sorry, you're right. Fixed.
fgrieu avatar
ng flag
Some [numbers from the authors](https://falcon-sign.info/falcon.pdf#40), oct 2020.
I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.