Research-focused cryptography startups deserve a lot of credit for the innovative work they do. They enrich the community and introduce solutions that may become crucial in the future. But their expertise is largely theoretical and academic, not practical and customer-aligned. wolfSSL, in contrast, is staffed by dedicated engineers with decades of experience delivering production quality solutions for critical infrastructure, crafting performant and portable code, often on short notice, for dozens of commercially significant architectures.
Given these hard-won advantages at wolfSSL, some cryptography providers have tried to differentiate themselves with custom hardware, promising a performance boost. Let’s test that proposition with a look at performance on lattice cryptography. The software implementation we’ll show is wolfSSL software production release 5.7.6, throughput per core on a commodity high performance CPU, in this case an AMD 7960X. The hardware-accelerated implementation we’ll show is PQShield’s PQPerform-Lattice, in a pre-production realization on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ at 322 MHz (see https://doi.org/10.1145/3689939.3695785).
| Algorithm | key | operation | ops/sec | cycles/op | ops/sec | cycles/op |
| size | wolfSSL | wolfSSL | PQShield | PQShield | ||
| KYBER512 | 128 | key gen | 422907 | 9955.0 | 140000 | 2300 |
| KYBER512 | 128 | encap | 231528 | 18184.5 | 100625 | 3200 |
| KYBER512 | 128 | decap | 230252 | 18225.0 | 68511 | 4700 |
Even when application-specific proprietary silicon has a performance advantage–which PQShield’s pre-production FPGA realization does not–it complicates platform design and production timelines, introduces supply-chain vulnerabilities, increases BoM expenses, and complicates parallelization. And crucially, it restricts crypto-agility, given hardware resources that are specific to a narrow class of cryptographic algorithm. This matters. It is widely acknowledged that Kyber/ML-KEM is based on a fairly new and under-studied body of mathematics, and further investigation may yet uncover a fatal flaw in this, or any of the other novel algorithms working their way through the standards-making process.
wolfSSL demonstrates superior performance with an open source software solution, without tying your design to a particular class of cryptographic algorithm. Indeed, our latest software implementation of ML-KEM is even faster than pre-standardization Kyber, attaining well over 300k encapsulation and decapsulation ops/s per core on the CPU shown above.
When you work with wolfSSL, your priorities become our priorities. We have always focused our resources on development, guided and enabled by our proud history of organic growth and customer-centric philosophy.
We provide the best tested code, worldwide 24×7 technical support that is second to none, and on-site interactions to ensure your goals are met. Our technical prowess and decades of experience let us operate across the whole spectrum of runtimes, from bare metal microcontrollers to data center big iron, with hand-crafted assembly optimizations fully leveraging vector instruction extensions.
Beyond the technical dimension, the professionals at wolfSSL focus on making sure you fully understand your options for licensing, support, and consulting, tailoring plans for your specific requirements and preferences. We draw up NDAs, SOWs and legal contracts so that you as a business have everything you need to secure your operational necessities.
Our team will see your project through, not only to delivery, but for the entire lifecycle after delivery. We are your reliable partner through the entire process, laser-focused on delivered results. This is what we do, and we do it better than anyone. This makes wolfSSL your ideal partner as you embark on the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography.
If you have questions about any of the above, please contact us at facts@wolfssl.com or +1 425 245 8247.
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