While embedded systems are widely used in smart meters, it is facing one challenge problem, i.e., how to protect the intellectual property (IP) of these systems (prevent from others’ illegal clone and duplication). This paper begins with the basic embedded system platform (based on field-programmable gate array), and proposes a novel IP protection strategy based on hardware obfuscation techniques. The proposed approach mainly consists of two stages’ techniques: at stage-I, a physical unclonable function (PUF) structure is being used to produce a group of data, and then in stage-II, the produced data is used to activate a hardware obfuscated finite field multiplier based on GF(2m). The obfuscated multiplier has already embedded into the hardware structure of embedded systems. The practical experiments prove that the proposed approach has strong performance in numerous attack simulations and can be extended to be used in products (similar to smart meters) because of its low area-complexity implementation.