EA-inequivalence of bent functions

Bent functions are maximally nonlinear Boolean functions with an even number of variables. They were introduced by Rothaus in 1976. For their own sake as interesting combinatorial objects, but also because of their relations to coding theory (Reed-Muller codes) and applications in cryptography (design of stream ciphers), they have attracted a lot of research, specially in the last 15 years. The class of bent functions contains a subclass of functions, introduced by Youssef and Gong in 2001, the so-called hyper-bent functions whose properties are still stronger and whose elements are still rarer than bent functions. Bent and hyper-bent functions are not classified. A complete classification of these functions is elusive and looks hopeless. So, it is important to design constructions in order to know as many of (hyper)-bent functions as possible. This paper is devoted to the constructions of bent and hyper-bent Boolean functions in polynomial forms. We survey and present an overview of the constructions discovered recently. We extensively investigate the link between the bentness property of such functions and some exponential sums (involving Dickson polynomials).

Binary bent functions have a strictly specified number of non-zero values. In the same way, ternary bent functions satisfy certain requirements on the elements of their value vectors. These requirements can be used to specify six classes of ternary bent functions. Classes are mutually related by encoding of function values. Functions within a class are mutually related by permutation of elements in their function vectors. Given a basic ternary bent function, other functions in the same class can be constructed by permutation matrices having a block structure similar to that of the factor matrices appearing in the Good-Thomas decomposition of Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier transform and related algorithms. Conversion of function vectors into matrices or equivalent matrix-valued vectors of smaller length leads to the redistribution of space complexity of related manipulation algorithms. In this matrix representations, construction of other bent functions from a given known bent function is performed by using either properties of bent functions or by manipulation of such representations in terms of FFT-like permutation matrices of dimensions smaller than the length of the function vector of the initial bent functions.

In this paper, we investigate properties of generalized bent Boolean functions and 2k-bent (i.e., negabent, octabent, hexadecabent, et al.) Boolean functions in a uniform framework. From the Hadamard matrices, Hodzic and Pasalic presented sufficient conditions for generalized bent functions. Using cyclotomic fields and the decomposition of generalized bent functions, we generalize their results, prove that Hodzic and Pasalic's conditions of generalized bent functions are not only sufficient but also necessary, and completely characterize generalized bent functions in terms of their component functions. Furthermore, we present a secondary construction of bent functions or semibent functions from generalized bent functions. Finally, we give the relations of generalized bent functions and 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k</sup> -bent functions, demonstrate that 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k</sup> -bent functions are actually a special class of generalized bent functions, and completely characterize 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k</sup> -bent functions.

This paper aims at the identification of classes of bent functions in order to allow their construction without searching or sieving. In order to reach this aim, we studied first the relationship between bent functions and complexity classes defined by the Specific Normal Forms of all Boolean functions. As result of this exploration we found classes of bent functions which are embedded in different complexity classes defined by the Specific Normal Form. In the second step to reach our global aim, we utilized the found classes of bent functions in order to express bent functions in terms of derivative operations of the Boolean Differential Calculus. In detail, we studied bent functions of two and four variables. This exploration leads finally to Boolean differential equations that will allow the direct calculation of all bent functions of two and four variables. A given generalization allows to calculate subsets of bent functions for each even number of Boolean variables.

$$\mathbb {Z}$$-bent functions, mappings from $$\mathbb {F}_2^n$$ to a subset of $$\mathbb {Z}$$, were introduced by Dobbertin and Leander (Des Codes Cryptogr 49:3–22, 2008) as an attempt to capture the origin of standard bent functions and in particular to understand better a recursive construction framework of bent functions. Nevertheless, many questions have been left open in Dobbertin and Leander (2008) such as efficient construction methods of $$\mathbb {Z}$$-bent functions of different levels, where these levels specify precisely a subset of $$\mathbb {Z}$$ containing both the image values of f and its normalized Fourier coefficients. In this article, using different design techniques, we provide several generic construction methods of $$\mathbb {Z}$$-bent functions of arbitrary levels, thereby solving an open problem posed in Dobbertin and Leander (2008). On the other hand, apart from an independent theoretical interest in these objects, our rigor treatment of the so-called gluing technique reveals that this approach is equivalent to a classical concept of concatenation. More precisely, gluing four suitable n-variables $$\mathbb {Z}$$-bent functions of level one to obtain an $$(n+2)$$-variable bent function directly corresponds to a concatenation of four suitable n-variable Boolean functions. Nevertheless, the recursive framework based on $$\mathbb {Z}$$-bent functions remains to be investigated further in this context.

Inspired by the works of Mesnager (IEEE Trans Inf Theory 60(7):4397–4407, 2014) and Tang et al. (IEEE Trans Inf Theory 63(10):6149–6157, 2017), we study a class of bent functions of the form $$f(x)=g(x)+F(f_1(x),f_2(x),\ldots ,$$ $$f_{\tau }(x))$$ , where g(x) is a function from $$\mathbb {F}_{p^{n}}$$ to $${\mathbb {F}}_{p}$$ , $$f_i(x)=\prod _{j=1}^{\kappa _i}{\text {Tr}}(u_{ij}x)$$ for $$1\le i\le \tau $$ , $$\kappa _i\ge 1$$ and $$F(x_1,\ldots ,x_{\tau })$$ is a reduced polynomial in $${\mathbb {F}}_{p}[x_1,\ldots ,x_{\tau }]$$ . As a consequence, we obtain a generic result on the Walsh transform of f(x) in terms of g(x) and characterize the bentness of f(x) for the cases $$F(x_1,\ldots ,x_{\tau })$$ without and with restrictions respectively, which enables us to generalize some earlier works and derive new bent functions from known ones. In addition, we study the construction of bent functions f(x) when g(x) is not bent for the first time and present a class of bent functions from non-bent Gold functions.

Bent functions are a class of discrete functions which exhibit the highest degree of nonlinearity. As such bent functions form an essential part of cryptographic systems. Original concept of bent functions defined in GF(2) can be extended to multiple-valued case. Multiple-valued bent functions are defined in therms of properties of their Vilenkin-Chrestenson spectra. Decision diagrams are a method of compact representation of discrete functions. Special types of decision diagrams have been introduced for various types of discrete functions. In this paper we demonstrate how Vilenkin-Chrestenson decision diagrams can be used for efficient representation of multiple-valued bent functions.

Boolean functions are fundamental building blocks in both discrete mathematics and computer science, with applications spanning from cryptography to coding theory. Bent functions, a subset of Boolean functions with maximal nonlinearity, are particularly valuable in cryptographic applications. This study introduces a novel equivalence relation among all Boolean functions and presents an algorithm to generate bent functions based on this relation. We systematically generated a collection of 10,000 bent functions over eight variables, all originating from the same equivalence class, and analyzed their structural complexity through rank determination. Our findings revealed the presence of at least five distinct affine classes of bent functions within this collection. By employing this construction, we devised an algorithm to generate a filter function capable of combining Boolean functions. This filter function can be dynamically adjusted based on a key, offering potential applications in symmetric cipher design, such as enhancing security or improving efficiency.

Bent functions are maximally nonlinear Boolean functions with an even number of variables. They have attracted a lot of research for four decades because of their own sake as interesting combinatorial objects, and also because of their relations to coding theory, sequences and their applications in cryptography and other domains such as design theory. In this paper we investigate explicit constructions of bent functions which are linear on elements of spreads. After presenting an overview on this topic, we study bent functions which are linear on elements of presemifield spreads and give explicit descriptions of such functions for known commutative presemifields. A direct connection between bent functions which are linear on elements of the Desarguesian spread and oval polynomials over finite fields was proved by Carlet and the second author. Very recently, further nice extensions have been made by Carlet in another context. We introduce oval polynomials for semifields which are dual to symplectic semifields. In particular, it is shown that from a linear oval polynomial for a semifield one can get an oval polynomial for transposed semifield.

In this article we study two party Communication Complexity of Boolean bent functions from Maiorana–McFarland class. In particular, we describe connections between Maiorana–McFarland construction of bent functions and operations on matrix form of Boolean functions and show that bent functions of 2n variables from Maiorana–McFarland class have deterministic communication complexity equal n + 1. Finally, we show that not all bent functions have high communication complexity lower bound by giving the example of such function.

In this paper, we obtain a new class of $p$-ary binomial bent functions which are determined by Kloosterman sums. The bentness of another three classes of functions is characterized by some exponential sums and some results in \cite{Linian2013} are generalized. Furthermore we obtain, in some special cases, some bent functions are determined by Kloosterman sums.

Bent functions over the finite fields of an odd characteristic received a lot of attention of late years. In Cesmelioglu et al. (J Comb Theory Ser A 119:420---429, 2012), Cesmelioglu and Meidl (Des Codes Cryptogr 66:231---242, 2013), an efficient method of construction of weakly regular and non-weakly regular bent functions defined over a finite field with odd characteristic is presented. In this paper, we give an adaptation of this method to the ring of integers modulo $$p^m$$pm, where p is an odd prime and m is a positive integer. We emphasize that different results than the results of the finite field case are obtained in every application process. First, we give a method that constructs bent functions using plateaued functions by increasing the dimension. Then, in order to give concrete examples, we compute Walsh spectrum of some specific quadratic functions defined over the ring of integers modulo $$p^m$$pm and apply the construction method on these functions. There are notable differences between the cases when m is odd and even. Also, we explain how to determine weakly regular and non-weakly regular bent functions among the bent functions that are constructed by the method.

Recently in Çeşmelioğlu, Meidl (Adv. Math. Commun.,18, 2024), the study of EA-equivalence and CCZ-equivalence for functions from {mathbb {V}}_n^{(p)} to the cyclic group {mathbb {Z}}_{p^k} has been initiated, where {mathbb {V}}_n^{(p)} denotes an n-dimensional vector space over {mathbb {F}}_p. Amongst others it has been shown that there exist functions from {mathbb {V}}_n^{(2)} to {mathbb {Z}}_4 which are CCZ-equivalent but not EA-equivalent. We extend these results to larger classes of functions from {mathbb {V}}_n^{(p)} to {mathbb {Z}}_{p^k}. We then discuss constructions of generalized bent functions from {mathbb {V}}_n^{(p)} to {mathbb {Z}}_{p^k}, p odd or p=2 and n is even, which correspond to large affine spaces of bent functions. In particular we employ versions of the direct sum, the semi-direct sum and of a recent secondary bent function construction in Wang et. al., (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory69, 2023), to generate large affine spaces of bent functions. Finally we present a solution for constructing generalized bent functions from {mathbb {V}}_n^{(2)} to {mathbb {Z}}_{2^k}, n odd, from arbitrary generalized bent functions from {mathbb {V}}_{n-1}^{(2)} to {mathbb {Z}}_{2^{k-1}}.

We present a new characterization of semi-bent and bent quadratic functions on finite fields. First, we determine when a GF(2)-linear combination of Gold functions Tr(x2i+1) is semi-bent over GF(2n), n odd, by a polynomial GCD computation. By analyzing this GCD condition, we provide simpler characterizations of semi-bent functions. For example, we deduce that all linear combinations of Gold functions give rise to semi-bent functions over GF(2p) when p belongs to a certain class of primes. Second, we generalize our results to fields GF(pn) where p is an odd prime and n is odd. In that case, we can determine whether a GF(p)-linear combination of Gold functions Tr(xpi+1) is (generalized) semi-bent or bent by a polynomial GCD computation. Similar to the binary case, simple characterizations of these p-ary semi-bent and bent functions are provided.

The p-ary function f(x) mapping GF(p4k) to GF(p) and given by f(x)=Tr4k(xp3k+p2k-pk+1+x2) is proven to be a weakly regular bent function and the exact value of its Walsh transform coefficients is found. This is the first proven infinite class of nonquadratic generalized bent functions over the fields of an arbitrary odd characteristic. The proof is based on a few new results in the area of exponential sums and polynomials over finite fields that may also be interesting as independent problems.