Introduction
HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) is a code-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) whose security is based on the hardness of solving the Quasi-Cyclic 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 | 32 B | 4 433 B | 32 B | 75 k | 152 k | 375 k |
| HQC-3 | 4 514 B | 32 B | 8 978 B | 32 B | 175 k | 349 k | 812 k |
| HQC-5 | 7 237 B | 32 B | 14 421 B | 32 B | 355 k | 712 k | 1 624 k |
HQC sizes (in Bytes) and performances (in CPU Cycles)