Timing Attack Paper

I went to

http://www.cryptography.com/timingattack.html

and found the whole thing to be totally incomprehensible from
a layman's point of view.  I apologize for having not read
"Applied Cryptography", which might have made the abstract a
simpler read - but even if I had I'd have been baffled by a
lot of the terminology and equations in this paper.

Can anyone post a brief summary which explains the essential
workings of the attack?  I'd be very grateful.

--giles

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Giles Bowkett writes:
> http://www.cryptography.com/timingattack.html
> 
> and found the whole thing to be totally incomprehensible from
> a layman's point of view.  I apologize for having not read
> "Applied Cryptography", which might have made the abstract a
> simpler read - but even if I had I'd have been baffled by a
> lot of the terminology and equations in this paper.

If you had read and understood Applied Cryptography you would
understand the paper. I'm sorry, but to paraphrase a smarter man than
I, there is no royal road to cryptography. You have to study it.

The only thing that can be said to a layman is that different keys
will require different amounts of times to deal with different texts
in certain public key systems, so by timing how long it takes to
perform operations you can get information about the keys.

Perry