Constant-time BIGNUM is bollocks

In a recent poll, OpenSSL Communities members were asked what technical features should be prioritized for upcoming OpenSSL releases. The results of the poll ranked constant-time BIGNUM as the second-most requested feature. This contrarian talk discusses the challenges of designing and implementing a truly constant-time arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic software library, why the cryptographer's mantra "just make it constant time" is a pipe dream, and radical alternative approaches that eschew this intrinsic limitation.