[45128] in Cypherpunks
Paul Kocher's timing attack
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matt Blaze)
Sun Dec 10 22:22:43 1995
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 1995 22:12:21 -0500
From: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>
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
