Category: side-channel

Consider this common example used to demonstrate timing attacks:

async def sign_in(username, password):
  user = await get_user_from_db(username)
  if user is None:
    return False  # early return :(

  password_hash = slow_hash(password)
  return verify(password_hash, user.password_hash)

The usual suggestion is to do the same thing on all execution branches. For example, something like this:

async def sign_in(username, password):
  user = await get_user_from_db(username)
  if user is None:
    actual_password_hash = "foo"
  else:
    actual_password_hash = user.password_hash

  password_hash = slow_hash(password)
  res = verify(password_hash, actual_password_hash)
  return res and user is not None

But I wonder if the following strategy is also useful against timing attacks (not considering other types of side-channel attacks), while not wasting computing resources:

async def sign_in(username, password):
  # Longer than what `sign_in_impl` takes normally
  fixed_duration = ... 

  _, sign_in_result = await asyncio.gather(delay(fixed_duration), sign_in_impl)

  return sign_in_result

# Awaits a certain amount of time
async def delay(duration):
  ...

# This takes variable time
async def sign_in_impl(username, password):
  user = await get_user_from_db(username)
  if user is None:
    return False  # early return :(

  password_hash = slow_hash(password)
  return verify(password_hash, user.password_hash)