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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon briansmith

Document the importance of avoiding (timing) side channels

Open briansmith opened this issue 4 years ago • 1 comments

When reviewing PR #47 by @stepancheg I realized that there's no documentation here about why or how we avoid leaking information about the contents of the slice held in an Input or Reader unless/until specifically requested.

ring internally uses untrusted to process secret buffers so untrusted.rs can only inspect/report/leak the value of any byte of the input if/when the caller specifically requests it. So, for example, peek() can inspect the value of the next byte but a Debug implementation cannot.

briansmith avatar Apr 27 '21 01:04 briansmith

Perhaps we should remove PartialEq and similar from Input? Or maybe we need a way to distinguish secret inputs from non-secret inputs that can enable such variable-time functions.

briansmith avatar May 04 '21 23:05 briansmith