3 ms·

Cache timing attacks have been known for a while, for example across VMs in 2009: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/cloudsec.pdf https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hova

• ckastner 9y ago
  This paper from 2005 describes a cache timing attack that enabled an unprivileged process to another process' AES key: https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/cache.pdf https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/cache.pdf IIRC, the only way to address the issue was the addition of the AES-NI instruction set, which came a few years later.
  • cesarb 9y ago
    > IIRC, the only way to address the issue was the addition of the AES-NI instruction set, which came a few years later. Another option would be to use a bitsliced implementation of AES, at some cost in speed. I could also imagine an implementation which read the whole table every time, using constant-time operations to select the desired element(s), but I don't know how slow that would be.