CWEweakness

CWE-385 Covert Timing Channel

Medium Official page ↗
Abstraction
Base
Structure
Simple
Status
Incomplete
Likelihood of exploit
Medium
Languages
Not Language-Specific
CWE version
5.0

Description

Covert timing channels convey information by modulating some aspect of system behavior over time, so that the program receiving the information can observe system behavior and infer protected information.

Common consequences

• Confidentiality, Other: Read Application Data, Other — In some instances, knowing when data is transmitted between parties can provide a malicious user with privileged information. Also, externally monitoring the timing of operations can potentially reveal sensitive data. For example, a cryptographic operation can expose its internal state if the time it takes to perform the operation varies, based on the state.

Potential mitigations

• [Architecture and Design] Whenever possible, specify implementation strategies that do not introduce time variances in operations. • [Implementation] Often one can artificially manipulate the time which operations take or -- when operations occur -- can remove information from the attacker. • [Implementation] It is reasonable to add artificial or random delays so that the amount of CPU time consumed is independent of the action being taken by the application.

Related

Attack pattern · CAPEC (1)

  • CAPEC-462 Cross-Domain Search Timing attack pattern

Child of · CWE (1)

Referenced by CAPEC · weakness (1)

  • CAPEC-462 Cross-Domain Search Timing attack pattern

Referenced by CVE · weakness (43)

  • CVE-2026-84308 phpseclib is a PHP secure communications library. vulnerability
  • CVE-2026-55785 free5GC is an open-source implementation of the 5G core network. vulnerability
  • CVE-2026-6478 Covert timing channel in comparison of MD5-hashed password in PostgreSQL authentication allows an attacker to recover user credentials… vulnerability
  • CVE-2026-5598 Covert timing channel vulnerability in Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-69893 A side-channel vulnerability exists in the implementation of BIP-39 mnemonic processing, as observed in Trezor One v1.13.0 to v1.14.0,… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-66442 In Mbed TLS through 4.0.0, there is a compiler-induced timing side channel (in RSA and CBC/ECB decryption) that only occurs with LLVM's… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-59425 vLLM is an inference and serving engine for large language models (LLMs). vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-9231 Issue summary: A timing side-channel which could potentially allow remote recovery of the private key exists in the SM2 algorithm… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-59432 SCRAM (Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism) is part of the family of Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL, RFC… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-49087 In Mbed TLS 3.6.1 through 3.6.3 before 3.6.4, a timing discrepancy in block cipher padding removal allows an attacker to recover the… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-7396 In wolfSSL release 5.8.2 blinding support is turned on by default for Curve25519 in applicable builds. vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-53826 File Browser provides a file managing interface within a specified directory and it can be used to upload, delete, preview, rename, and… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-27587 OpenSSL 3.0.0 through 3.3.2 on the PowerPC architecture is vulnerable to a Minerva attack, exploitable by measuring the time of signing of… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-29780 Post-Quantum Secure Feldman's Verifiable Secret Sharing provides a Python implementation of Feldman's Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS)… vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-13176 Issue summary: A timing side-channel which could potentially allow recovering the private key exists in the ECDSA signature computation. vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-0306 A vulnerability was found in Ruby. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-11862 Non constant time cryptographic operation in Devolutions.XTS.NET 2024.11.19 and earlier allows an attacker to render half of the encryption… vulnerability
  • CVE-2023-46809 Node.js versions which bundle an unpatched version of OpenSSL or run against a dynamically linked version of OpenSSL which are unpatched… vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-45192 An issue was discovered in Matrix libolm through 3.2.16. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-36405 liboqs is a C-language cryptographic library that provides implementations of post-quantum cryptography algorithms. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-26306 iPerf3 before 3.17, when used with OpenSSL before 3.2.0 as a server with RSA authentication, allows a timing side channel in RSA decryption… vulnerability
  • CVE-2023-33855 Under certain conditions, RSA operations performed by IBM Common Cryptographic Architecture (CCA) 7.0.0 through 7.5.36 may exhibit… vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-25964 Dell PowerScale OneFS 9.5.0.x through 9.7.0.x contain a covert timing channel vulnerability. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-2236 A timing-based side-channel flaw was found in libgcrypt's RSA implementation. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-23170 An issue was discovered in Mbed TLS 2.x before 2.28.7 and 3.x before 3.5.2. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-23342 The `ecdsa` PyPI package is a pure Python implementation of ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) with support for ECDSA (Elliptic Curve… vulnerability
  • CVE-2023-49092 RustCrypto/RSA is a portable RSA implementation in pure Rust. vulnerability
  • CVE-2023-3640 A possible unauthorized memory access flaw was found in the Linux kernel's cpu_entry_area mapping of X86 CPU data to memory, where a user… vulnerability
  • CVE-2020-29506 Dell BSAFE Crypto-C Micro Edition, versions before 4.1.5, and Dell BSAFE Micro Edition Suite, versions before 4.5.2, contain an Observable… vulnerability
  • CVE-2020-35164 Dell BSAFE Crypto-C Micro Edition, versions before 4.1.5, and Dell BSAFE Micro Edition Suite, versions before 4.6, contain an Observable… vulnerability
Show all 43 ›

Referenced by CWE · can precede (1)

  • CWE-208 Observable Timing Discrepancy weakness