Algorithmic Obfuscation over GF($2^m$)
This addresses hardware IP protection for companies in security applications, but it appears incremental as it focuses on a specific obfuscation method for existing GF arithmetic.
The paper tackles the problem of protecting hardware intellectual property by obfuscating Galois Field multiplication circuits, which are critical for security applications like ECC and AES, and demonstrates a technique that can hide the choice of irreducible polynomials to prevent competitive advantage.
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.