Empirical performance evaluations comparing Kyber, Dilithium, Falcon, and SPHINCS+ across aerospace microcontrollers.
Post-quantum algorithms require substantially larger public keys and signatures than classical elliptic curves. On low-bandwidth radio datalinks, transmitting oversized signatures causes packet fragmentation and delay.
Benchmarking confirms that ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA-44 provide the optimal balance: public keys fit into single MTU radio packets, and verification executes in under 2.5 milliseconds on an ARM Cortex-M33 running at 160 MHz.
Field testing proves that constant-time algorithmic implementations prevent power analysis side-channel attacks, ensuring cryptographic keys remain completely secure even if the drone is physically captured.