Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Constant time cryptography is a method of preventing side channel leaks via timing differences on various operations. Without this, it'd be possible to learn about the cryptographic operations that are occurring.

Compilers transform source code into machine code. The machine code is where the timing matters but we typically don't read this. While auditing ML-KEM, they noticed that Clang undid some of the constant time measuring in the name of optimization.

The authors posted a demo of exploiting the timing differences in the key encapsulation to extract the key. Overall, this brings up an interesting issue - where do our compilers fail? Most code-level things are correct but it cannot understand what sections can't be optimized.