[Cryptography] Exotic Operations in Primitive Construction

[Jerry Leichter]

>> It's not clear what other "exotic" operations you might use.
> Galois field multiply? Isn't that directly supported by some CPU? The
> advantage over rotate, xor or ADD is "strong mixing". The result of the
> Galois field multiply makes all output bits dependent of every input
> bit....

I don’t know of any hardware supporting this as a primitive, though of course that can change. (The main trend these days is to provide direct hardware support for the most commonly required algorithms, not more primitives.)

I think Galois multiplication is typically done using a lookup table.

                                         -- Jerry