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by nature556 595 days ago
Abstract Real-world cryptographic code is often written in a subset of C intended to execute in constant-time, thereby avoiding timing side channel vulnerabilities. This C subset eschews structured programming as we know it: if-statements, looping constructs, and procedural abstractions can leak timing information when handling sensitive data. The resulting obfuscation has led to subtle bug
1 comments

Since it appears you have chosen to incompletely quote the problem statement from the abstract as your submission statement, and since by accident or design the full title was not included in your submission:

This paper describes FaCT, a DSL for timing-sensitive computation. It is described as allowing readable, high-level cryptographic code, with efficient, constant-time behavior.

At a very rough skim, the language seems to have interesting conveniences around implementing mitigations to timing channel attacks, like marking particular values 'secret' for the compiler.