Title
On the Derivative Imbalance and Ambiguity of Functions.
Abstract
In 2007, Carlet and Ding introduced two parameters, denoted by $Nb_F$ and $NB_F$, quantifying respectively the balancedness of general functions $F$ between finite Abelian groups and the (global) balancedness of their derivatives $D_a F(x)=F(x+a)-F(x)$, $ain Gsetminus{0}$ (providing an indicator of the nonlinearity of the functions). These authors studied the properties and cryptographic significance of these two measures. They provided for S-boxes inequalities relating the nonlinearity $mathcal{NL}(F)$ to $NB_F$, and obtained in particular an upper bound on the nonlinearity which unifies Sidelnikov-Chabaud-Vaudenayu0027s bound and the covering radius bound. At the Workshop WCC 2009 and in its postproceedings in 2011, a further study of these parameters was made; in particular, the first parameter was applied to the functions $F+L$ where $L$ is affine, providing more nonlinearity parameters. In 2010, motivated by the study of Costas arrays, two parameters called ambiguity and deficiency were introduced by Panario emph{et al.} for permutations over finite Abelian groups to measure the injectivity and surjectivity of the derivatives respectively. These authors also studied some fundamental properties and cryptographic significance of these two measures. Further studies followed without that the second pair of parameters be compared to the first one. In the present paper, we observe that ambiguity is the same parameter as $NB_F$, up to additive and multiplicative constants (i.e. up to rescaling). We make the necessary work of comparison and unification of the results on $NB_F$, respectively on ambiguity, which have been obtained in the five papers devoted to these parameters. We generalize some known results to any Abelian groups and we more importantly derive many new results on these parameters.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TIT.2019.2912196
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cryptography,Time-frequency analysis,Boolean functions,Upper bound,Fourier transforms,Information theory
Boolean function,Affine transformation,Discrete mathematics,Abelian group,Combinatorics,Nonlinear system,Multiplicative function,Upper and lower bounds,Computer science,Permutation,Fourier transform
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
65
9
0018-9448
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shihui Fu111.06
Xiutao Feng211.73
Qiang Wang323737.93
Claude Carlet42925226.81