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Benchmarks

Cost of one PQ envelope at the cryptographic layer. Numbers below are from BenchmarkDotNet 0.14, short-job, on a Windows 11 host running .NET 10.0.300 (single AMD x86_64 core), captured during the 0.1.0-preview.3 build. Your hardware will differ; the shape of the numbers will not.

ML-KEM-768 micro-cost

Operation Mean Allocations
GenerateKeyPair ~75 µs ~27 KiB
Encapsulate ~93 µs ~31 KiB
Decapsulate ~101 µs ~38 KiB

ML-KEM-768 keypair generation is one-shot at first-run + once per rotation. Encapsulation runs on every Data Protection key persist; decapsulation runs once per persisted key on host startup and once per key invalidation/rotation thereafter.

End-to-end envelope cost

Realistic payload (≈ 250 bytes of Data Protection descriptor XML), full chain — ML-KEM + classical wrap + AES-256-GCM + XML wrapping.

Operation Mean Allocations
Envelope Encrypt (Hybrid) ~89 µs ~72 KiB
Envelope Encrypt (MlKemOnly) ~87 µs ~65 KiB
Envelope Decrypt (Hybrid) ~137 µs ~75 KiB
Envelope Decrypt (MlKemOnly) ~137 µs ~68 KiB

The classical layer in Hybrid mode adds ≈ 2 µs and ≈ 7 KiB per envelope on top of MlKemOnly. For the security improvement of belt-and-braces post-quantum + classical, this is a free trade-off.

What this means for production

ASP.NET Core Data Protection rotates its own keys every ~90 days by default and holds a handful of active keys at any time. Envelope encryption is a startup-path cost (≈ 100 µs per key, once per key persist) — not a request-path cost. Cookie verification, antiforgery validation, and IDataProtector.Unprotect all read keys from the in-memory key ring; they never go through this envelope.

Concretely: a host with 8 active Data Protection keys pays ≈ 1.1 ms total to unwrap them at startup, once per process. After that, the envelope is invisible to the request path.

Reproducing

dotnet run -c Release --project benchmarks/PostQuantum.DataProtection.Benchmarks -- --filter '*'

Filter to a single suite:

dotnet run -c Release --project benchmarks/PostQuantum.DataProtection.Benchmarks -- --filter '*MlKem*'
dotnet run -c Release --project benchmarks/PostQuantum.DataProtection.Benchmarks -- --filter '*Envelope*'

The --job short flag runs a brief BenchmarkDotNet job suitable for CI / quick sanity checks. Drop it for production-quality measurements (≈ 60 s per benchmark instead of ~10 s).

Honest scope

These are micro-benchmarks of the cryptographic work. They do not include:

  • Disk I/O against the keystore (single sync write, sub-millisecond on local SSD).
  • The Argon2id host KEK derivation (one-shot at startup; bounded by the chosen KekWorkFactor).
  • Network latency from a cloud-backed key store (not yet shipped — see future.md).

For end-to-end host-startup latency, profile the host.

To God be the glory — 1 Corinthians 10:31.