Paper 2026/915

Execution-time and microarchitectural profiling of RustCrypto and PQClean ML-KEM/ML-DSA implementations under Linux cgroup resource constraints

Abstract

Existing benchmarks of post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms focus on raw throughput or latency on unconstrained hardware, leaving open the question of how implementation choices affect microarchitectural behavior under varying resource pressure. This paper addresses that gap by profiling RustCrypto and PQClean implementations of ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA-65 across three cgroups-enforced configurations (0.5 CPUs, 1.0 CPUs, and unconstrained). The C baseline uses PQClean reference code; the Rust implementation uses the RustCrypto project's ml-kem crate v0.3.0 and ml-dsa crate v0.0.4. We utilize robust non-parametric statistics (Median and Interquartile Range) over the full execution distributions to reduce sensitivity to scheduler-induced timing variance and avoid arbitrary outlier filtering. Alongside hardware performance counters, we present Flamegraphs to analyze sampled execution hotspots. Results demonstrate that the evaluated Rust configurations exhibit a latency overhead for both ML-KEM (+42.4%) and ML-DSA (+47.8%) under severe 0.5 CPUs throttling compared to clang-compiled C. Massif traces attribute all additional Rust heap usage entirely to runtime initialization, with no observable dynamic allocation within the measured cryptographic core execution paths.

Note: A preprint version of this manuscript is also available at DOI: [10.13140/RG.2.2.32756.72329]