3 ms·
First off, thanks to the authors for making it clear that this is a difficult attack vector to exploit. I'm tired of sites like these that make it seem like it'
by imadethis 6y ago
First off, thanks to the authors for making it clear that this is a difficult attack vector to exploit. I'm tired of sites like these that make it seem like it's the end of the world.
As this is a timing based attack, I wonder what the feasibility would be in a real-world network environment. From a brief skim of the paper, it looks like they were getting a false positive rate of 10% between two VMs on a Gigabit connection. I wonder how quickly that would increase if the servers were in different buildings / cities / continents.
- Matthias247 6y ago> between two VMs on a Gigabit connection and likely nothing else running. Real world webservers running tons of concurrent requests have a very variable processing times (if you get below 5ms you are very good!) purely due to queued up work and context switches.
- DarthGhandi 6y agoThe amount of extra time needed to sift through network jitter isn't really that huge. It's far less than what people imagine even with basic statistical techniques.
- Matthias247 6y agoMaybe. My point was that even even network jitter won’t be important, since software processing latencies are much higher. If a server handles another request before your handshake that’s thousands more instructions which obfuscate the result. If it does another TLS handshake before it’s thread might be blocked for several ms before it gets to processing the next thing. That’s all orders of magnitudes higher than any „this tool longer because some bits are different“ measurements
- baby 6y agoNo matter what people say, timing attacks are not practical over the network.
- MrXOR 6y agoAttacks only get better ... https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/researchers-exploit-http-2-wpa3-protocols-to-stage-highly-efficient-timeless-timing-attacks https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/researchers-exploit-http-...