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Comment by rqebmm | Hacker News Reader

This was a complaint I heard from several people I work with who took the course.

To my knowledge there has never been a timing attack documented in the wild on a remote server. They are only practical in offline scenarios with host access

Depends on what you mean by timing attack.

The only vulnerability of Tor, which heavily depends on cryptography, is timing analysis.

One of the most important lessons of cryptography is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Timing between messages and message sizes can be enough to end you.

I guess "timing analysis" means something else, more akin to correlation of meta-data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack is pretty clear, so maybe I was referring to something else than the OP.

Funny you should mention this in a thread about Dan Boneh's crypto class.

David Brumley and Dan Boneh, "Remote Timing Attacks Are Practical." In Proc. USENIX Security Symposium, 2003. https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/ssl-timing.pdf

Abstract

Timing attacks are usually used to attack weak computing devices such as smartcards. We show that timing attacks apply to general software systems. Specifically, we devise a timing attack against OpenSSL. Our experiments show that we can extract private keys from an OpenSSL-based web server running on a machine in the local network. Our results demonstrate that timing attacks against network servers are practical and therefore all security systems should defend against them.

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