Paul Kocher's timing attack

Matt Blaze mab at research.att.com
Sun Dec 10 19:14:36 PST 1995


Paul Kocher's brutally clever timing attack against on-line
implementations of RSA, DSA and fixed-exponent Diffie-Hellman
is reported on page A1 of Monday's New York Times ("Secure Digital
Transactions Just Got a Little Less Secure" by John Markoff).

The attack requires only a few thousand ciphertext samples and works
against most implementations of public-key cryptosystems in which
the attacker can measure accurately the target's computation time for
each sample.

I think Kocher's paper is online somewhere; I'll post the URL
when I find it.

-matt






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