Several classes of bent functions over finite fields

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).

The question of establishing EA-inequivalence among the classes of bent functions remains in general an open problem. The EA-inequivalence is also relevant in classifying bent functions within the same class. This paper is an attempt to investigate these questions for the Maiorana–McFarland ($$\mathcal{M}$$) class and so-called class $$\mathcal{H}$$ of bent functions. For cubic bent functions of the form $$Tr_1^t(xy^{2^i+1})$$ in $$\mathcal{M}$$, the necessary and sufficient conditions related to EA-equivalence are derived. It is also shown that in most of the cases, at least over finite fields of relatively small order, bent functions within $$\mathcal{H}$$ are EA-inequivalent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bent functions are maximally nonlinear Boolean functions. They are important functions introduced by Rothaus and studied firstly by Dillon and next by many researchers for four decades. Since the complete classification of bent functions seems elusive, many researchers turn to design constructions of bent functions. In this paper, we show that linear involutions (which are an important class of permutations) over finite fields give rise to bent functions in bivariate representations. In particular, we exhibit new constructions of bent functions involving binomial linear involutions whose dual functions are directly obtained without computation. The existence of bent functions from involutions heavily relies on solving systems of equations over finite fields.

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.

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.

We use the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) framework to model and solve the problem of designing substitution functions for substitutionpermutation (SP) networks as proposed by Shannon for the architecture of ciphers. Many ciphers are designed using the SP pattern, and differ mainly by two parametrized functions: substitution and permutation. The most difficult of the two is the substitution function, which has to be nonlinear (a requirement that was difficult to define and quantify). Over time, researchers such as Nyberg, Pieprzyk and Matsui have proposed various metrics of nonlinearity that make the function robust to modern attacks. Before us, people have attempted various ways to design functions that respect these metrics. In the past people hand-picked substitution tables (S-boxes) by trying various values. Recently they use difficult to analyze constructs (such as Bent functions, spectral inversion, inverses in Galois fields) whose outputs are tested for nonlinearity. While efficient, such techniques are neither exhaustive (optimal), nor did they manage to generate better substitutions than the ones hand-picked in the past. We show that Matsui's nonlinearity requirement can be naturally modelled using CSPs. Based on a combination of existing CSP techniques and some new filtering operators that we designed specially for the new types of constraints, we manage to obtain better S-boxes than any previously published ones. The simplicity of the CSP framework and availability of general CSP solvers like ours, makes it easy for more people to design their own ciphers with easy to understand security parameters. Here we report on this new application of CSPs.

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}}.

The bent functions are the Boolean functions of an even number of variables which are at the maximum possible distance from the set of all affine functions. In this paper, it is shown that each isometric mapping of the set of Boolean functions of n variables to itself preserving the class of bent functions is a combination of an affine transformation of coordinates and a shift by an affine function. It is proved that the affine functions are precisely all Boolean functions which are at the maximum possible distance from the class of bent functions.