"Right - it is looking more and more like truly constant time code can only be obtained by using hand written assembly or hardware. In that eventuality, I guess

"Right - it is looking more and more like truly constant time code can only be obtained by using hand written assembly or hardware. In that eventuality, I guess the core crypto code in the JVM will have to be changed to use hand written assembly as well, however, SSL is huge and most of it doesn't need to be constant time (certificate parsing, managing network buffers, message parsing etc). That is often where the bugs creep in." I completely agree with you there. X.509 is a nightmare and it's not an area where constant time matters at all. Being resistant to buffer overruns and general logic errors is much more important there.