Abstract: The invention provides improved techniques for multiplication of signals represented in a normal basis of a finite field. An illustrative embodiment includes a first rotator which receives a first input signal representative of a first normal basis field element (a0 a1 . . . am−1), and a second rotator which receives a second input signal representative of a second normal basis field element (b0 b1 . . . bm−1). A word multiplier receives output signals from the first and second rotators, corresponding to rotated representations of the first and second elements, respectively, and processes the rotated representations w bits at a time to generate an output signal representative of a product of the first and second elements, where w is a word length associated with the word multiplier. The rotated representation of the first element may be given by A[i]=(ai ai+1 . . .