1995-12-11 - Paul Kocher’s timing attack

Header Data

From: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 90a7346426672b10a12c2394010219fc4022fe2b6feedae98c40f05a55c3032d
Message ID: <199512110312.WAA14627@nsa.tempo.att.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1995-12-11 03:14:36 UTC
Raw Date: Sun, 10 Dec 95 19:14:36 PST

Raw message

From: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 95 19:14:36 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Paul Kocher's timing attack
Message-ID: <199512110312.WAA14627@nsa.tempo.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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





Thread