[Bitcoin-development] New side channel attack that can recover Bitcoin keys

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Peter Todd <pete at petertodd.org> wrote:
> If you're following good practices you're not particularly vulneable to
> it, if at all, even if you make use of shared hosting. First of all you
> shouldn't be re-using addresses, which means you won't be passing that
> ~200 sig threshold.
>
> More important though is you shouldn't be using single factor Bitcoin
> addresses. Use n-of-m multisig instead and architect your system such

Both of these things have long been promoted as virtuous in part
because they increase robustness against this sort of thing.

But while I don't disagree with these things the reality is that many
people do not follow either of these piece of advice and following
them requires behavioral changes that will not be adopted quickly...
so I don't think that advice is especially useful.

And even if it were—, good security involves defense in depth, so
adding on top of them things like side-channel resistant signing is
important.

I haven't had a chance to sit down and think through it completely but
I believe oleganza's recent blind signature scheme for ECDSA may be
helpful (http://oleganza.com/blind-ecdsa-draft-v2.pdf):

The idea is that instead of (or in addition to— belt and suspenders)
making the signing constant time, you use the blinding scheme to first
locally blind the private key and point being signed, then sign, then
unblind.  This way even if you are reusing a key every signing
operation is handling different private data... and the only point
where unblinded private data is handled is a simple scalar addition.