[alkonaut]

That's true of course. So basically adding timing noise is equivalent to adding artificial slowdowns. The only upside I suppose is that it might solve all timing sidechannel attacks in one go. So it's not 3% for one and 4% for the next and so on. It's a one time cost to disable timing as an attack vector.

[throwaway2048]

Adding randomness doesn't solve the issue, it just slows it down somewhat. Fast operations are still going to be faster on average, etc.