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blinding
A trick where a secret operation is scrambled with a random value first, so its timing or power use reveals nothing about the secret.
In RSA signing, an attacker who can measure exactly how long the private-key math takes can slowly deduce the key. Blinding multiplies the input by a random factor before the secret operation and divides it out afterward, so each run looks different and the timing no longer correlates with the key. It is a standard countermeasure against timing attacks, noted here as out of scope for the current implementation.
See also
- constant-timeA coding discipline where execution timing never varies based on secret data.