Strings that have more characters in common take longer to compare. This can result in a timing attack. However, in practice strings are often not compared one byte at a time, and time differences are very small. Therefore, timing attacks are not necessarily possible, even when using strcmp or == to compare strings.

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This post discusses string comparison timing attacks and how different programming languages handle string comparison. It explains how timing attacks can be mitigated and highlights the limitations of such attacks due to modern implementations.

String comparison timing attacks