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Timing attack

About: Timing attack is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 726 publications have been published within this topic receiving 25462 citations.


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Book ChapterDOI
18 Aug 1996
TL;DR: By carefully measuring the amount of time required to perform private key operalions, attackers may be able to find fixed Diffie-Hellman exponents, factor RSA keys, and break other cryptosystems.
Abstract: By carefully measuring the amount of time required tm perform private key operalions, attackers may be able to find fixed Diffie-Hellman exponents, factor RSA keys, and break other cryptosystems. Against, a valnerable system, the attack is computationally inexpensive and often requires only known ciphertext. Actual systems are potentially at risk, including cryptographic tokens, network-based cryptosystems, and other applications where attackers can make reasonably accurate timing measurements. Techniques for preventing the attack for RSA and Diffie-Hellman are presented. Some cryptosystems will need to be revised to protect against the attack, and new protocols and algorithms may need to incorporate measures to prevenl timing attacks.

3,989 citations

Book ChapterDOI
13 Feb 2006
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe side-channel attacks based on inter-process leakage through the state of the CPU's memory cache, which can be used for cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives that employ data-dependent table lookups.
Abstract: We describe several software side-channel attacks based on inter-process leakage through the state of the CPU’s memory cache. This leakage reveals memory access patterns, which can be used for cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives that employ data-dependent table lookups. The attacks allow an unprivileged process to attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor, despite partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing and virtualization. Some of our methods require only the ability to trigger services that perform encryption or MAC using the unknown key, such as encrypted disk partitions or secure network links. Moreover, we demonstrate an extremely strong type of attack, which requires knowledge of neither the specific plaintexts nor ciphertexts, and works by merely monitoring the effect of the cryptographic process on the cache. We discuss in detail several such attacks on AES, and experimentally demonstrate their applicability to real systems, such as OpenSSL and Linux’s dm-crypt encrypted partitions (in the latter case, the full key can be recovered after just 800 writes to the partition, taking 65 milliseconds). Finally, we describe several countermeasures for mitigating such attacks.

1,050 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
17 May 2015
TL;DR: This work presents an effective implementation of the Prime+Probe side-channel attack against the last-level cache of GnuPG, and achieves a high attack resolution without relying on weaknesses in the OS or virtual machine monitor or on sharing memory between attacker and victim.
Abstract: We present an effective implementation of the Prime Probe side-channel attack against the last-level cache. We measure the capacity of the covert channel the attack creates and demonstrate a cross-core, cross-VM attack on multiple versions of GnuPG. Our technique achieves a high attack resolution without relying on weaknesses in the OS or virtual machine monitor or on sharing memory between attacker and victim.

950 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a timing attack against OpenSSL and demonstrate that timing attacks against network servers are practical and therefore security systems should defend against them, and they show that timing attack applies to general software systems.

850 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
16 Oct 2012
TL;DR: This paper details the construction of an access-driven side-channel attack by which a malicious virtual machine (VM) extracts fine-grained information from a victim VM running on the same physical computer and demonstrates the attack in a lab setting by extracting an ElGamal decryption key from a victims using the most recent version of the libgcrypt cryptographic library.
Abstract: This paper details the construction of an access-driven side-channel attack by which a malicious virtual machine (VM) extracts fine-grained information from a victim VM running on the same physical computer. This attack is the first such attack demonstrated on a symmetric multiprocessing system virtualized using a modern VMM (Xen). Such systems are very common today, ranging from desktops that use virtualization to sandbox application or OS compromises, to clouds that co-locate the workloads of mutually distrustful customers. Constructing such a side-channel requires overcoming challenges including core migration, numerous sources of channel noise, and the difficulty of preempting the victim with sufficient frequency to extract fine-grained information from it. This paper addresses these challenges and demonstrates the attack in a lab setting by extracting an ElGamal decryption key from a victim using the most recent version of the libgcrypt cryptographic library.

839 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202312
202221
202120
202030
201956
201849