We show that this belief might be wrong. We present a Hamming weight attack on an addition operation. It works with random inputs to the addition circuit, hence masking even helps in the case when we cannot control the plaintext. It can be applied to any round of the encryption. Even with moderate accuracy of measuring power consumption it determines explicitly subkey bits. The attack combines the classical power analysis (over Hamming weight) with the strategy of the saturation attack performed using a random sample.

We conclude that implementing addition in cryptographic devices must be done very carefully as it might leak secret keys used for encryption. In particular, the simple key schedule of certain algorithms (such as IDEA and Twofish) combined with the usage of addition might be a serious danger.