Benchmarking Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation in S3-Compatible Object Storage under Client Concurrency

Abstract

Data encrypted today with classical public-key algorithms could be decrypted once large quantum computers exist. Cloud object stores keep data for years, so the client-side encryption that protects it must move to post-quantum algorithms such as ML-KEM, which adds a key-encapsulation step and a larger ciphertext to every stored object. So far, the cost of ML-KEM has been measured for the algorithm on its own and for securing network connections, but not for encrypting each object in a storage system that serves many clients at once. It has therefore been unclear whether ML-KEM slows such a system, under which conditions, and why. We address this problem by measuring per-object ML-KEM against classical key exchange on an S3-compatible object store, with two client implementations, two processor types and up to 500 concurrent workers, using pre-registered experiments and statistical equivalence tests. ML-KEM reduced throughput only when the client's processor was at or near full load, with one unexplained exception, and then by 4.0 to 4.9% in our main client. Controlled experiments on one processor type traced most of that loss to the way the software library was called, and a second, native client showed that the size of the loss depends on the implementation. The lasting cost is storage: 1,056 more bytes per object than with classical key exchange. The results cover two clients, one single-node store and one cloud provider.