Side channel timing attacks have been an active research topic for many years. I'm not a member of that community and I'm sure there are many people on HN who a

Side channel timing attacks have been an active research topic for many years. I'm not a member of that community and I'm sure there are many people on HN who are far better placed to explain the context than I am, but from what I've seen the momentum around practical side channel exploits has been building up for over a year now, there's been a number of public talks on the subject at conferences and consequently several research groups were motivated to pursue similar lines of research at roughly the same time. It's also a fairly tight knit community and I'm sure they exchange information informally as well. I know you asked for specific citations, but I'd rather let someone who actually works in this area respond. I've read a few of the earlier articles on these subjects, but I'm not qualified to detail the full context surrounding the earlier research.