Re:Hertzbleed Attack
by vajrabum on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @10:05PM
(#31748324)
Isn't rounding pretty much the same thing as throwing away some precision in this case? So if I drop some (enough) bits and add .5 then no amount of averaging is going to recover the lost precision. Or maybe I misunderstand?
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Re:Hertzbleed Attack
by danielheath on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @11:22PM
(#31748774)
Example: You need to know how whether an operation takes 30 or 31 milliseconds, but your timer is rounded to the nearest 100ms, so you just get 0 or 100.
If you repeat the operation 100 times and time how long that takes, you should either get 3000 or 3100 milliseconds.
..and a dramatically increased likelihood of something unrelated going on in the system ruining your results. It's easy to dismiss mitigations like this as "not a solution", but at least those that add uncertainty to sidechannel attacks seem to complement each other quite nicely. Uncertainties don't add, they multiply.