Benchmarking Post-Quantum Cryptography on Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: ML-KEM and ML-DSA on ARM Cortex-M0+

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 19 Mar 2026] Benchmarking Post-Quantum Cryptography on Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: ML-KEM and ML-DSA on ARM Cortex-M0+ Rojin Chhetri The migration to post-quantum cryptography is urgent for Internet of Things devices with 10-20 year lifespans, yet no systematic benchmarks exist for the finalised NIST standards on the most constrained 32-bit processor class. This paper presents the first isolated algorithm-level benchmarks of ML-KEM (FIPS 203) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204) on ARM Cortex-M0+, measured on the RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) at 133 MHz with 264 KB SRAM. Using PQClean reference C implementations, we measure all three security levels of ML-KEM (512/768/1024) and ML-DSA (44/65/87) across key generation, encapsulation/signing, and decapsulation/verification. ML-KEM-512 completes a full key exchange in 36.3 ms consuming 2.87 mJ--17x faster and 94% less energy than ECDH P-256 on the same hardware. ML-DSA signing exhibits high latency variance due to rejection sampling (coefficient of variation 61-71%, 99th-percentile up to 1,115 ms for ML-DSA-87). The M0+ incurs only a 1.8-1.9x slowdown relative to published Cortex-M4 results, despite lacking 64-bit multiply, DSP, and SIMD instructions. All code, data, and scripts are released as an open-source benchmark suite for reproducibility. Comments: 12 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Performance (cs.PF) MSC classes: 94A60 ACM classes: C.3; E.3 Cite as: arXiv:2603.19340 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.19340v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.19340 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Rojin Chhetri Mr [view email] [v1] Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:27:29 UTC (56 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AR cs.PF References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)