Implementing a side channel timing attack - hmac

Question

I'm working on a project implementing a side channel timing attack in C on HMAC. I've done so by computing the hex encoded tag and brute forcing byte-by-byte by taking advantage of strcmp's timing optimization. So for every digit in my test tag, I calculate the amount of time it takes for every hex char to verify. I take the hex char that corresponds to the highest amount of time calculated and infer that it is the correct char in the tag and move on to the next byte. However, strcmp's timing is very unpredictable. Although it is easy to see the timing differences between comparing two equal strings and two totally different strings, I'm having difficulty finding the char that takes my test string the most time to compute when every other string I'm comparing to is very similar (only differing by 1 byte).
The changeByte method below takes in customTag, which is the tag that has been computed up to that point in time and attempts to find the correct byte corresponding to index. changeByte is called n time where n=length of the tag. hexTag is a global variable that is the correct tag. timeCompleted stores the average time taken to compute the testTag at each of the hex characters for a char position. Any help would be appreciated, thank you for your time.
// Checks if the index of the given byte is correct or not
void changeByte(unsigned char *k, unsigned char * m, unsigned char * algorithm, unsigned char * customTag, int index)
{
long iterations=50000;
// used for every byte sequence to test the timing
unsigned char * tempTag = (unsigned char *)(malloc(sizeof (unsigned char)*(strlen(customTag)+1 ) ));
sprintf(tempTag, "%s", customTag);
int timeIndex=0;
// stores the time completed for every respective ascii char
double * timeCompleted = (double *)(malloc (sizeof (double) * 16));
// iterates through hex char 0-9, a-f
for (int i=48; i<=102;i++){
if (i >= 58 && i <=96)continue;
double total=0;
for (long j=0; j<iterations; j++){
// calculates the time it takes to complete for every char in that position
tempTag[index]=(unsigned char)i;
struct rusage usage;
struct timeval start, end;
getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF, &usage);
start=usage.ru_stime;
for (int k=0; k<50000; k++)externalStrcmp(tempTag, hexTag); // this is just calling strcmp in another file
getrusage (RUSAGE_SELF, &usage);
end=usage.ru_stime;
}
double startTime=((double)start.tv_sec + (double)start.tv_usec)/10000;
double endTime=((double)end.tv_sec+(double)end.tv_usec)/10000;
total+=endTime-startTime;
}
double val=total/iterations;
timeCompleted[timeIndex]=val;
timeIndex++;
}
// sets next char equal to the hex char corresponding to the index
customTag[index]=getCorrectChar (timeCompleted);
free(timeCompleted);
free(tempTag);
}
// finds the highest time. The hex char corresponding with the highest time it took the
// verify function to complete is the correct one
unsigned char getCorrectChar(double * timeCompleted)
{
double high =-1;
int index=0;
for (int i=0; i<16; i++){
if (timeCompleted[i]>high){
high=timeCompleted[i];
index=i;
}
}
return (index+48)<=57 ?(unsigned char) (index+48) : (unsigned char)(index+87);
}

Answer 1

I'm not sure if it's the main problem, but you add seconds to microseconds directly as though 1us == 1s. It will give wrong results when number of seconds in startTime and endTime differs.
And the scaling factor between usec and sec is 1 000 000 (thx zaph). So that should work better:
double startTime=(double)start.tv_sec + (double)start.tv_usec/1000000;
double endTime=(double)end.tv_sec + (double)end.tv_usec/1000000;