Securing On-Chip Operations against Timing Attacks

Cryptosystem designers frequently assume that secrets will be manipulated in closed, reliable computing environments. Unfortunately, actual microchips leak information about the operations they process. Cryptosystems often take slightly different amounts of time to process different inputs and also internal signals. By carefully measuring the amount of time required to perform private key operations, attackers may be able to discover secret exponents or keys to break the cryptosystem [2, 4]. A technique to hide the time differences from attackers using random delays is shown in this report.