Dr. Bartholomew P. Sniffington, Chair of Behavioral Cryptography at the Institute for Applied Composure, unveiled a groundbreaking new side-channel countermeasure this week: treating the adversary as a misbehaving household pet.

The approach, demonstrated live at a security workshop, involves lightly spraying the adversary with water and firmly saying “bad dog” whenever they attempt to collect timing measurements.

“For decades, we have focused on constant-time implementations,” Dr. Sniffington explained while holding what observers described as a “compliance-enhancing spray bottle.” “But the real variable in any timing attack is the attacker. We propose stabilizing that.”

The method, formally introduced as Adversarial Conditioning, models the attacker as a stimulus-responsive entity whose behavior can be shaped through repetition and mild inconvenience.

Dr. Sniffington is best known for his earlier paper, On the Use of Tone in Constant-Time Proofs (2024), in which he argued that sufficiently firm phrasing reduces variance in both execution paths and seminar discussions.

Under the proposed threat model, each cache probe or branch-prediction measurement triggers a corrective misting. After several iterations, the adversary reportedly begins associating L1 misses with negative reinforcement.

“By the second spray, most attackers exhibit visible confusion,” the draft paper notes. “By the fourth, they approach the system only cautiously. By the sixth, they sit.”

An accompanying theorem states: for any secret key k and adversary A, the probability that A continues a timing attack after sufficient conditioning converges to zero, assuming access to water and a firm tone.

Critics raised questions about scalability. “What about distributed adversaries?” asked one security engineer.

Dr. Sniffington acknowledged the concern. “We are developing a cloud-native version involving automated misting arrays and pre-recorded reprimands,” he said. “Early results suggest improved compliance across regions.”

Dr. Sniffington further noted that cloud environments offer a strategic advantage. “Clouds are, fundamentally, water,” he said. “From a deployment perspective, this dramatically reduces overhead. In many regions, the infrastructure is already emotionally prepared.”

The paper also introduces a formal distinction between “good attackers,” who respect boundaries, and “bad attackers,” who require additional hydration.

When pressed on whether this constitutes a constant-time guarantee, the cryptographer replied, “From the system’s perspective, absolutely. Execution time is invariant. Only the adversary’s morale varies.”

At press time, the team had begun exploring an advanced mitigation strategy known as “withholding treats.”