Remote Timing Attacks Are Practical

Wow. Read 'datacenter' for 'machine in the local network'.

Just so everyone knows, this specific attack is rather old. Modern versions of the RSA algorithm use blinding to specifically prevent this, which causes the RSA calculations to effectively be performed on random data.

There has also recently been a published timing attack regarding elliptic curve signatures, and there are some older papers about AES's vulnerability to timing attacks due to cache misses when using S-boxes. So while this paper specifically isn't a viable attack today, it is still relevant.

This was published in 2003: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251354

That doesn't change the importance of securing against timing side-channel attacks, however.

In other words, don't use versions of OpenSSL that are almost a decade old.