constant-time-testing

Detect timing side channels in cryptographic implementations to prevent secret extraction attacks. Timing attacks exploit variations in execution time to extract secret information from cryptographic implementations. Unlike cryptanalysis that targets theoretical weaknesses, timing attacks leverage implementation flaws - and they can affect any cryptographic code. Timing attacks were introduced by Kocher in 1996. Since then, researchers have demonstrated practical attacks on RSA ( Schindler ), OpenSSL ( Brumley and Boneh ), AES implementations, and even post-quantum algorithms like Kyber . Timing vulnerabilities can: Two prerequisites enable exploitation: Four patterns account for most timing vulnerabilities: Conditional jumps cause different code paths, leading to vast timing differences. Array access dependent on secrets enables cache-timing attacks, as shown in AES cache-timing research . Integer division and shift operations leak secrets on certain CPU architectures and compiler configurations.