Engineering high-speed packet inspection and routing engines that process millions of post-quantum handshakes per second at the Linux network driver level.
Passing high-bandwidth network traffic through the standard Linux kernel network stack (sk_buff allocations, socket queues, context switches) introduces significant latency and CPU overhead, capping router throughput under heavy multi-gigabit cryptographic traffic.
PQCRoute deploys eBPF programs attached directly to the network interface card (NIC) driver layer via XDP. The program inspects TLS and IPsec headers immediately upon packet arrival in the DMA ring buffer, executing routing and filtering decisions in single clock cycles before standard kernel processing.
Empirical benchmarks demonstrating how eBPF-based cryptographic routing scales linearly across multi-core CPU architectures, delivering 100 Gbps line-rate throughput while consuming minimal CPU overhead.