COMPUTATIONAL METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR FINITE FIELD ARITHMETIC

Elements of the finite field GF(2.sup.m) are represented by a vector of m binary digits in such a way that multiplication can be performed by using the same logic function to compute each binary component of the product of two elements, squaring can be performed by logic circuitry that rotates the vector representing the element to be squared, and addition can be performed by logic circuitry that forms the modulo-two sum of the corresponding components of the two vectors representing the elements to be summed.