R
"Can it be fair to require the average programmer to understand inline assembly, or any of these other inherently obtuse obfuscation techniques?"
can it be fair for the average programmer (if they don't understand this stuff) to just not write code where timing channels matter? who ever writes these articles
@rachelplusplus there's some work in this direction in the LLVM community!
Constant-Time Coding Support Summary We (@kumarak, @frabert, @hbrodin, @wizardengineer, and myself of Trail of Bits) propose a Clang “constant-time selection” builtin for cryptographers to use to ensure that their compil…
LLVM Discussion Forums (discourse.llvm.org)
I guess people are just going to keep discovering that you can't really make a C compiler do constant time
FOSDEM 2026: Security devs forced to hide Boolean logic from overeager optimizer
(www.theregister.com)
@whitequark for sure there's a lot going on!
something I've been thinking about is how, when I teach a class, I tell the TAs to never, ever touch the keyboard when they're helping a student with an assignment. not even once! because as soon as someone else is driving, it becomes real easy for the student to stop thinking and just let things happen.
kind of like what happens when we use a coding assistant.
