[seats]

tptacek or others with domain knowledge-

Is the timing attack hardening suggested in the blog post a standard approach?

If I was trying to attack a system and knew loosely that they did what he suggested (hashing then comparing vs comparing with timing exposed) , my untrained instinct would be that this is the weakest part. In other words I think this just makes the timing attack a little more difficult, but still possible, by producing specific hashes that carry out the timing attack.

When I've needed to harden comparisons against timing attacks, I've always just used constant time comparison functions, such as these ->

http://codahale.com/a-lesson-in-timing-attacks/ http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/07/timing-independent-array-co...