I'm just interested in cryptography, so please don't expect me to be an expert. ;) I recently read about AES cache timing attacks and found it very interesting. I read the article Cache-timing attacks on AES by Daniel Bernstein, but I don't seem to understand everything.
- How relevant is this to "real-life" network applications? As I understand it, the measurements have to be extremely precise to leak information. Are networks (even LAN networks) fast enough for that? (The author measures the time on the server and sends it to the client.)
- The author dedicates a long section on how to prevent the OS to interrupt an AES computation. But how does this leak any information? Yes, the calculation takes more time than usual, but it is not dependent on the input?
- Assuming this is in fact a problem to network applications. Would it be sufficient to wait() to a constant time after encryption and before sending any data over the network?