If a single bit was known through all states in AES, which would cause the most information to leak? This question is motivated by some bad Verilog.  Due to someone being sloppy with port assignments and a output statement, I have an AES core that has a single-bit from a S-Box in the key schedule tied to a pin.  This was caught in my audit of the HDL; however, it's sort of a neat error.  Due to the nature of the hardware, I can get 10-bits of information about the key out of it as it's configured for AES-128 and it's a very parallel implementation (it's actually the LSB of the squaring module in the S-Box on the lowest byte of the key).  This got me thinking:

If you are an attacker and could watch one bit of AES-128 for 10 rounds, which bit would you choose to recover the most useful information?  I feel it would be a bit in the key schedule.
If you are an attacker and could watch one bit of AES-128 for 10 rounds, which bit would you choose to recover the most useful information? I feel it would be a bit in the key schedule.


Actually, I'd expect a leak of one of the internal state bits would give the attacker more information.

The key schedule is static, and so if you leak 10 bits, well, you still have (at best) 118 bits of uncertainty in the key; no where close to small enough to be useful for an attacker.

However, if you leak the internal state, you can look at (say) one of the internal state bits after each round.  The advantage there is that we can look at the bits for a number of known plaintexts/ciphertexts; this yields considerably more information.  After 1 round, an internal bit is a function of the plaintext and 33 key bits; by looking at a number of plaintexts, we can get enough information to deduce those 33 key bits.