Algorithmic Obfuscation over GF(2m)

Cunxi Yu, Daniel E. Holcomb

Abstract: Galois Field arithmetic blocks are the key components in many security applications, such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and the S-Boxes of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher. This paper introduces a novel hardware intellectual property (IP) protection technique by obfuscating arithmetic functions over Galois Field (GF), specifically, focusing on obfuscation of GF multiplication that underpins complex GF arithmetic and elliptic curve point arithmetic functions. Obfuscating GF multiplication circuits is important because the choice of irreducible polynomials in GF multiplication has the great impact on the performance of the hardware designs, and because the significant effort is spent on finding an optimum irreducible polynomial for a given field, which can provide one company a competitive advantage over another.