Introduction
HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) is a code-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) whose security is based on the hardness of solving the Quasi-Cylic Syndrome Decoding (QCSD) problem.
HQC is one of the selected algorithms from the NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project.
Overview
The table below provides the sizes and performances of HQC.
Sizes are given for the keypair (ek, dk), ciphertext c and shared key K.
Performances are reported for an implementation using AVX2 instructions on an Intel Core i7-11850H (2.5 GHz) CPU.
| Instance | |ek| | |dk| | |c| | |K| | Keygen | Encaps | Decaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HQC-1 | 2 241 B | 2 321 B | 4 433 B | 32 B | 76 k | 150 k | 353 k |
| HQC-3 | 4 514 B | 4 602 B | 8 978 B | 32 B | 181 k | 355 k | 732 k |
| HQC-5 | 7 237 B | 7 333 B | 14 421 B | 32 B | 363 k | 720 k | 1 435 k |
HQC sizes (in Bytes) and performances (in CPU Cycles)