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Timing Attacks: Why Your Code Might Be Leaking Secrets
- Side-channel attacks analyze unintended information leakage from the physical implementation of a system during normal operation.
- Timing attacks are a common side-channel attack that targets how code runs to extract sensitive data by measuring response times.
- Researchers demonstrated extracting RSA private keys over a network through timing analysis in 2003, highlighting the real danger of timing attacks for systems.
- Authentication systems with timing leaks can reveal sensitive information through response time differences for valid and invalid inputs.
- Rate limiting systems can become timing attack vectors, allowing attackers to detect rate limits and adjust attack patterns.
- Defending against timing attacks requires constant-time programming, architectural defenses, and monitoring systems to ensure execution time independence from secret data.
- Constant-time comparison functions and architectural defenses like decoupling requests/responses are essential in timing attack defense.
- Monitoring systems help detect timing attack attempts through analysis of request patterns and response times.
- Protecting code against timing attacks involves switching to timing-safe functions, implementing dummy processing for authentication failures, and using libraries with built-in protection.
- Combining defensive layers like constant-time implementations, architectural protections, and monitoring is crucial to resist timing attacks across various applications.
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