Post-Quantum PKI: A Survey of Applications and Benchmarking Practices

Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is, and should be, currently dominating the field of cybersecurity, with many works designing and evaluating the transition of communications security to quantum-safe solutions. As the security level and implementations of post-quantum algorithms become more mature, the research on their application to realistic conditions changes accordingly, especially their application to widely adopted network architectures and corresponding protocols such as the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). In this survey, we identified articles presenting ways of integrating PQC algorithms to PKI and classified related work according to the employed methods and benchmarking choices. The main results from many evaluations converge to similar conclusions on the performance of the most popular PC digital signature algorithms; however, modeling choices concerning architecture variants, hardware and measurement metrics vary. The diversity of the results and experimental setups makes comparison difficult and arrival at an objective conclusion regarding PKI requirements almost impossible. Ultimately, this review reveals a fragmented landscape of benchmarking practices for post-quantum PKI systems. The absence of standardized evaluation frameworks and common test environments limits the comparability and reproducibility of the findings. We aim to provide reference implementations, which are essential to guide the transition of PKI infrastructures toward robust, scalable, and quantum-resistant deployments.