BaseIncomplete

CWE-385Covert Timing Channel

Category: other

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· 1

  • Confidentiality / Other — Read Application Data, Other
    Information exposure.

Potential mitigations· 3

  • [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 CAPEC attack patterns· 1

CAPEC-462

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/385.html

Exploits (incoming)1

TypeTargetConfidenceTier
AttackPatternCross-Domain Search Timingcapec-462100%live

(incoming)1

TypeTargetConfidenceTier
VulnerabilityCVE-2025-53826cve-2025-538260%live

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.

CWE
Covert Channel
CWE
Covert Storage Channel
CWE
DEPRECATED: Covert Timing Channel
CWE
Observable Timing Discrepancy
CWE
Exposure of Sensitive Information during Transient Execution
CWE
Predictable from Observable State
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.