Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 526 posts.

Software Engineering
455

Why Constant-Time Crypto?

In 1996, Paul Kocher published a novel attack on RSA, specifically on RSA implementations , that extracted information on the private key by simply measuring the time taken by the private key operation on various inputs. It took a few years for people to accept the idea that such attacks were practical and could be…