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Comment by Demiurge | Hacker News Reader

Every time I read one of these posts about a clever "attack vector", how something can be gleaned from this special register, or a timing attack, somesuch, I remember about a theory that the sound of a dinosaurs scream can be extracted from the waves impact made on a rocks crystal structure.

I googled pretty hard for real life example uses of a timing attack, and now using of stale data on the register, but couldn't find anything. Does anyone know of examples of this actually being done?

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These types of attacks though only require one person to create a system that can reliably exploit them, and then the vulnerability will be in the wild and a more significant problem. Pulling off this type of attack is difficult, but you only need one piece of malware that has a reliable way to exploit this in a general case and then it becomes available to every script kiddie who finds some motivation for stealing private keys.

These type of attacks also might become more of a problem as more sensitive computation is done on shared machines (IE cloud compute).

So, while there's no reason to panic because these security features aren't implemented hardly anywhere, you can't let the issues sit unaddressed for long periods of time.

But there is a whole range of potential issues. Or things compiler developers can do. As any task, they should be sorted, weighted by ease of exploitation and ease of solving. What I suspect, and I'm just curious to see if I am wrong, is that developers postulate vulnerabilities that real hackers would never bother with, and miss what they really go for, such as trivial mistakes, such as forgetting bounds checking.

So, I've seen a lot of (conceptually) trivial exploits and combinations of trivial exploits, but I would love to see a real world example of someone collecting enough information from an 'bad RNG', registers, or timing, to do anything with it.

For examples of real implementations of timing attacks, try this: http://www.contextis.com/documents/2/Browser_Timing_Attacks....

Some of those are fixed now, but the history stealing link redrawing one is still an issue as far as I know (or at least, this bug is still open https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=884270 ).

Thanks, that's pretty awesome. However, I was talking about attacks relying on non-constant time memory copy or math function that is used to somehow defeat a server or cryptography.

A few examples:

"Remote Timing Attacks are Practical" https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/ssl-timing.pdf

"RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis" http://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/

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