Timing attacks extract your confidential data from observations of the time used by your computer. Timing attacks have been demonstrated again and again to successfully extract complete cryptographic keys and other secrets.

This web site, timing.attacks.cr.yp.to, is aimed at end users, operating-system distributors, CPU manufacturers, and software engineers who would like to know what they can do to protect data against timing attacks.

Authors

Daniel J. Bernstein has coauthored more than 50 attack papers on a wide range of cryptographic topics, including the influential paper "Cache-timing attacks on AES", but he works primarily on protecting systems against attack. His fast high-security Curve25519 and ChaCha20 cryptographic algorithms are now used every day by billions of people. These algorithms were designed from the outset to help systems engineers stop timing attacks.

Billy Bob Brumley works primarily on attacking systems using timing as a side channel, protection being a by-product. On the offense side, he coinvented / codiscovered / codeveloped

• the first cache-timing attack on OpenSSL ECC
• the first cache-timing attack on OpenSSL DSA
• the first remote timing attack on OpenSSL ECC, CVE-2011-1945
• other side-channel vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, e.g., CVE-2018-0737
• side-channel vulnerabilities in Google's BoringSSL (and Chrome), e.g., CVE-2016-2178
• side-channel vulnerabilities in LibreSSL, e.g., CVE-2016-7056
• side-channel vulnerabilities in ARM's Mbed TLS, e.g., CVE-2019-18222, CVE-2020-10932
• side-channel vulnerabilities in Mozilla's NSS (and Firefox, Thunderbird), e.g., CVE-2020-6829, CVE-2020-12399, CVE-2020-12400, CVE-2020-12401, CVE-2020-12402
• side-channel vulnerabilities in wolfSSL, e.g., CVE-2020-11735
• the first bug attack in the wild, CVE-2011-4354
• various side-channel attack vectors, e.g., Cache Storage, Certified Side Channels, CVE-2019-1547
• various microarchitecture attack techniques, e.g., PortSmash, CVE-2018-5407, Degrade, HyperDegrade

On the defense side, his implementations of cryptographic algorithms are now used every day by billions of people, including (but not limited to) his free and open-source software (FOSS) contributions to OpenSSL and Mozilla's NSS / Firefox / Thunderbird.