Automatic Test Case Generation for Vulnerability Analysis of Galois Field Arithmetic Circuits

The research work proposes a framework for checking the correctness of Galois field arithmetic operations in digital circuits. The authors propose to automatically generate the test cases from the user input, avoiding reliance upon predesigned test cases, comprising Galois field-width and respective choice of irreducible polynomial. We do this through the use of polynomial arithmetic to verify the circuits. To the best of author's knowledge, though extensive work has been carried out in optimising the performance of arithmetic operations in Galois field, there exist no testbench to evaluate the efficacy of hardware circuits incorporating this concept. By automating the process of generating test cases, the work can be scaled to test circuits of arbitrarily large field widths, thus providing a flexible architecture that guarantees correctness of the underlying design under test. We present simulation results for Galois field polynomials of width GF(2
²
)), GF(2
⁴
) and GF(2
⁸
). This work can be applied to test and prevent intentional tampering of data bit stream and safeguarding it against malicious activities, especially in applications such as cryptography that heavily relies on Galois field arithmetic.