Benchmarking NIST-Standardized Post-Quantum Digital Signatures (ML-DSA-44) for Secure IoT Authentication

As the Internet of Things (IoT) expands to encompass billions of devices in critical sectors like smart grids, healthcare, and industrial automation, ensuring the authenticity of data is paramount. Currently, digital signatures such as RSA and ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) are the bedrock of IoT authentication. However, the theoretical advent of fault-tolerant quantum computers threatens to break these schemes using Shor's Algorithm, which would allow attackers to forge identities and hijack devices. To preempt this crisis, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has standardized ML-DSA (Dilithium) as the primary Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) digital signature. While robust, there are concerns regarding its performance overhead on resource-constrained IoT hardware. This paper presents a comprehensive feasibility study of ML-DSA-44 (Dilithium2), the lightweight variant of the standard. Utilizing a cross-compiled ARM64 emulation environment (QEMU) to replicate modern IoT gateway architecture, we benchmarked the critical operations of Key Generation, Signing, and Verification. Our empirical results reveal a verification latency of just 0.507 milliseconds and a signing latency of 1.869 milliseconds. These findings confirm that post-quantum authentication is computationally feasible for modern IoT devices, enabling a secure transition to the quantum era without necessitating expensive hardware upgrades.