4 ms·

all I know is that it doesn't take even one microsecond to compare 32 bytes - it takes nanoseconds. and yes, I can't think of a way to meaningfully measure that

all I know is that it doesn't take even one microsecond to compare 32 bytes - it takes nanoseconds. and yes, I can't think of a way to meaningfully measure that delta over a real network, where every packet passes through dozens of switches and routers, each one of which introduces enough entropy to completely drown out any attempt to measure things with such precision. but more importantly, what kind of system allows itself to be pounded with thousands or millions of requests to the authentication endpoint?

madacol 3y ago
- a repeated event when aggregated (like summed or averaged) tends to look more and more like a normal distribution the more samples you got - the standard deviation of a normal distribution scales roughly by the square root of the number of samples - From microseconds to nanoseconds you need a 1000x in precision, 1000² = 1.000.000. So from an event that has a noise amplitude of microseconds, I think you may be able to measure a difference of nanoseconds with ~1 million samples. --- So yeah unlikely in normal scenarios. But if you could, for example, rent a server in 10km from your target, you can reduce by 10-100x the latency, which will reduce your number of samples by its square, so a 100x-10000x reduction And what if it's possible to rent a server in the same datacenter of your target? ... well K.O.