"Cache timing goes back to at least 2005 with Osvik and Tromer. This isn't a simple cache timing bug, though." (tptacek)

"Cache timing goes back to 2005 with Percival. I published a couple weeks before them. :-)" (cpercival)

Cache timing goes back to the VAX Security Kernel (early 1990's) designed for those A1 certification requirements that tptacek calls useless, "red tape." One of the mandated techniques was covert, channel analysis of whole system. They found lots of side channels in hardware and software they tried to mitigate. Hu found one in CPU caches following with a design to mitigate it. That was presented in 1992.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16083384

Since Hu is paywalled, see (b) "cache-type covert timing channels" in his patent:

https://www.google.ch/patents/US5574912

So, one of INFOSEC's founders (Paul Karger) did the first, secure VMM for non-mainframe machines. The team followed the security certification procedures discovering a pile of threats that required fixes from microcode for clean virtualization to mitigation of cache, timing channels. They published that. Most security professionals outside high assurance sector and CompSci ignored and/or talked crap about their work presumably without reading it. Those same folks reported later on virtualization stacks hit in 2000's with the attack from 1992 on new software with weaker security than KVM/370 done in 1978. Now, another attack making waves uses the 1992 weakness combined with another problem they discovered by looking at what interacts with it. That might have been discovered earlier if they did that with x86 like high-assurance security (aka "red tape") did in 1995 for B3/A1 requirements with them spotting potential for SMM and cache issues:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2209/42809262c17b6631c0f653...

Note: High-assurance security was avoiding x86 wherever allowed by market for stuff like what's in that report. As report notes with exemplar systems, market often forced it to detriment of security. Their identification of SMM as a potential attack vector preempted Invisible Things by quite a bit of lead time. That was typical in this kind of work since TCSEC require thoroughness.

In 2016, one team surveyed the components plus research on them in a modern CPU. Researchers had spotted branching as a potential, timing channel pretty quickly after CPU's got mainstream attention.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/613.pdf

So, a team following B3 or A1 requirements of TCSEC for hardware like in 1990-1995 would've identified the cache channels (as done in 1992) plus other risky components. They'd have applied a temporal or non-interference analysis like they did with secure TCB's in 1990's to early 2000's. A combination of human eyeballs plus model-checking or proving for interference might have found recent attacks, too, given prior problems found in ordering or information flow violations. This is a maybe but I say focusing on interactions with known-risks would've sped discovery with high probability. Far as resources, it would be one team doing this on one grant using standard, certification techniques from mid-1980's on a CPU others analyzed in mid-1990's say it was bad for security due to the cache leaking secrets, too many privileged modes, various components implemented poorly, and so on.

I keep posting this stuff on HN, Lobste.rs, and so on since it's apparently (a) unknown to most new people in the security field for who knows what reason or (b) dismissed by some of them based on the recommendations of popular, security professionals who have clearly never read any of it or built a secure, hardware/software system. I'm assuming you were unaware of the prior work given your scrypt work brilliantly addressed a problem at root cause quite like Karger et al did when they approached security problems. The old work's importance is clear as I see yet again well-known, security professionals are citing attack vectors discovered, mitigated, and published in the 1990's like it was a 2005 thing. How much you want to bet there's more problems they already solved in their security techniques and certifications that we'd profit from applying instead of ignoring?

I encourage all security professionals to read up on prior work in tagged/capability machines, MLS kernels, covert channel analysis, secure virtualization, trusted paths, hardware security analysis, and so on. History keeps repeating. It's why I stay beating this drum on every forum.