Performance Analysis and Acceleration of Hamming Quasi-Cyclic Algorithm in Raspberry Pi 4 Environment

Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) is a code-based key encapsulation mechanism that stands out in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process. Almost all of the execution times of the HQC algorithm stem from high-order polynomial multiplication operations. These high-order polynomials constitute the execution times of the HQC algorithm. In this study, different hierarchical combinations of Toom-Cook (TC) and Karatsuba algorithm (KA) were analyzed to optimize the performance of HQC. Tests revealed that the highest throughput on the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (ARM Cortex-A72) platform was achieved with the TC4 + TC3 + KA2 combination. By optimizing the hardware's pipeline and cache structure, improvements in processing times of 50.5%, 52.8%, and 41.6% were achieved in the HQC-128, 192, and 256 variants, respectively, compared to the standard versions; this approximately doubled the performance. Cite this article as: C. İnce, “Performance analysis and acceleration of Hamming Quasi-Cyclic algorithm in raspberry pi 4 environment,” Electrica, 26, 0091, 2026. doi: 10.5152/electrica.2026.26091.