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Cyclic codes are widely employed in communication systems, storage devices, and consumer electronics, as they have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. BCH codes, as a special subclass of cyclic codes, are in most cases among the best cyclic codes. A subclass of good BCH codes are the narrow-sense BCH codes over \mathrm GF(q) with length n=(q^m-1)/(q-1) . Little is known about this class of BCH codes when $q>2$ . The objective of this paper is to study some of the codes within this class. In particular, the dimension, the minimum distance, and the weight distribution of some ternary BCH codes with length n=(3^{m}-1)/2 are determined in this paper. A class of ternary BCH codes meeting the Griesmer bound is identified. An application of some of the BCH codes in secret sharing is also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Let $n$ be a positive integer and $p$ a prime. The power mapping $x^{p^{n}-3}$ over ${\mathbb {F}}_{p^{n}}$ has desirable differential properties, and its differential spectra for $p=2,\,3$ have been determined. In this paper, for any odd prime $p$ , by investigating certain quadratic character sums and some equations over ${\mathbb {F}}_{p^{n}}$ , we determine the differential spectrum of $x^{p^{n}-3}$ with a unified approach. The obtained result shows that for any given odd prime $p$ , the differential spectrum can be expressed explicitly in terms of $n$. Compared with previous results, a special elliptic curve over ${\mathbb {F}}_{p}$ plays an important role in our computation for the general case $p \ge 5$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we generalize constructions in two recent works of Ding, Heng, and Zhou to any field $\mathbb {F}_{{q}}$ , ${q}$ odd, providing infinite families of minimal codes for which the Ashikhmin–Barg bound does not hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion complexity is a new figure of merit for cryptographic sequences. In this paper, we present an explicit formula of the (irreducible) expansion complexity of ultimately periodic sequences over finite fields. We also provide improved upper and lower bounds on the $N$ th irreducible expansion complexity when they are not explicitly determined. In addition, for some infinite sequences with given nonlinear complexity, a tighter upper bound of their $N$ th expansion complexity is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost perfect nonlinear (APN) functions over fields of characteristic 2 play an important role in cryptography, coding theory and, more generally, mathematics and information theory. In this paper we deduce a new method for constructing APN functions by studying the isotopic equivalence, concept defined for quadratic planar functions in fields of odd characteristic. In particular, we construct a family of quadratic APN functions which provides a new example of an APN mapping over ${\mathbb F}_{2^{9}}$ and includes an example of another APN function $x^{9}+ \mathop {\mathrm {Tr}}\nolimits (x^{3})$ over ${\mathbb F}_{2^{8}}$ , known since 2006 and not classified up to now. We conjecture that the conditions for this family are satisfied by infinitely many APN functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Eurocrypt’18, Cid et al. proposed a new cryptanalysis tool called Boomerang Connectivity Table (BCT), to evaluate S-boxes of block ciphers. Later, Boura and Canteaut further investigated the new parameter Boomerang uniformity for cryptographic S-boxes. It is of great interest to find new S-boxes with low Boomerang uniformity for even dimensions. In this paper, we prove that a class of permutation quadrinomials over $\mathbb {F}_{2^{2m}}$ with $m$ odd has Boomerang uniformity four, which gives the fifth class of such kind of permutation polynomials. Further, the occurrences of 0 and 4 in the BCTs of the investigated permutation polynomials are also completely determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimal linear codes have significant applications in secret sharing schemes and secure two-party computation. There are several methods to construct linear codes, one of which is based on functions over finite fields. Recently, many construction methods for linear codes from functions have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we generalize the recent construction methods given by Tang et al. in [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 62(3), 1166-1176, 2016] to weakly regular plateaued functions over finite fields of odd characteristic. We first construct three-weight linear codes from weakly regular plateaued functions based on the second generic construction and then determine their weight distributions. We also give a punctured version and subcode of each constructed code. We note that they may be (almost) optimal codes and can be directly employed to obtain (democratic) secret sharing schemes, which have diverse applications in the industry. We next observe that the constructed codes are minimal for almost all cases and finally describe the access structures of the secret sharing schemes based on their dual codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generalized Hamming weights (GHWs) of linear codes are fundamental parameters, the knowledge of which is of great interest in many applications. However, to determine the GHWs of linear codes is difficult in general. In this paper, we study the GHWs for a family of reducible cyclic codes and obtain the complete weight hierarchy in several cases. This is achieved by extending the idea of Yang et al. into higher dimension and by employing some interesting combinatorial arguments. It shall be noted that these cyclic codes may have arbitrary number of nonzeros. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Permutation codes have been shown to be useful in power line communications, block ciphers, and multilevel flash memory models. Construction of such codes is extremely difficult. In fact, the only general lower bound known is the Gilbert–Varshamov type bound. In this paper, we establish a connection between permutation codes and independent sets in certain graphs. Using the connection, we improve the Gilbert–Varshamov bound asymptotically by a factor \log (n), when the code length n goes to infinity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of tweakable block ciphers was formally introduced by Liskov--Rivest--Wagner at Crypto 2002 (the 2002 Annual International Cryptology Conference). The extension and the first construction, called CMC, of this notion to tweakable enciphering schemes which can handle variable length messages was given by Halevi--Rogaway at Crypto 2003. In this paper, we present HCH, which is a new construction of such a scheme. The construction uses two universal hash computations with a counter mode of encryption in-between. This approach was first proposed by McGrew--Viega to build a scheme called XCB and later used by Wang-Feng-Wu, to obtain a scheme called HCTR. A unique feature of HCH compared to all known tweakable enciphering schemes is that HCH uses a single key, can handle arbitrary length messages, and has a quadratic security bound. An important application of a tweakable enciphering scheme is disk encryption. HCH is well suited for this application. We also describe a variant, which can utilize precomputation and makes one less block cipher call. This compares favorably to other hash-encrypt-hash-type constructions, supports better key agility and requires less key material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two construction methods of designs from $(n,m)$ -bent functions, known as translation and addition designs. In this article we analyze, which equivalence relation for Boolean bent functions, i.e. $(n,1)$ -bent functions, and vectorial bent functions, i.e. $(n,m)$ -bent functions with $2\le m\le n/2$ , is coarser: extended-affine equivalence or isomorphism of associated translation and addition designs. First, we observe that similar to the Boolean bent functions, extended-affine equivalence of vectorial $(n,m)$ -bent functions and isomorphism of addition designs are the same concepts for all even $n$ and $m\le n/2$. Further, we show that extended-affine inequivalent Boolean bent functions in $n$ variables, whose translation designs are isomorphic, exist for all $n\ge 6$. This implies, that isomorphism of translation designs for Boolean bent functions is a coarser equivalence relation than extended-affine equivalence. However, we do not observe the same phenomenon for vectorial bent functions in a small number of variables. We classify and enumerate all vectorial bent functions in six variables and show, that in contrast to the Boolean case, one cannot exhibit isomorphic translation designs from extended-affine inequivalent vectorial $(6,m)$ -bent functions with $m\in \{ 2,3 \}$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A linear code is optimal if it has the highest minimum distance of any linear code with a given length and dimension. We construct infinite families of optimal binary linear codes $C_{\Delta ^{c}}$ constructed from simplicial complexes in $\mathbb {F}^{n}_{2}$ , where $\Delta $ is a simplicial complex in $\mathbb {F}^{n}_{2}$ and $\Delta ^{c}$ the complement of $\Delta $. We first find an explicit computable criterion for $C_{\Delta ^{c}}$ to be optimal; this criterion is given in terms of the 2-adic valuation of $\sum _{i=1}^{s} 2^{|A_{i}|-1}$ , where the $A_{i}$ ’s are maximal elements of $\Delta $. Furthermore, we obtain much simpler criteria under various specific conditions on the maximal elements of $\Delta $. In particular, we find that $C_{\Delta ^{c}}$ is a Griesmer code if and only if the maximal elements of $\Delta $ are pairwise disjoint and their sizes are all distinct. Specially, when $\mathcal {F}$ has exactly two maximal elements, we explicitly determine the weight distribution of $C_{\Delta ^{c}}$. We present many optimal linear codes constructed by our method, and we emphasize that we obtain at least 32 new optimal linear codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A secret sharing scheme typically requires secure communications in each of two distribution phases: 1) a dealer distributes shares to participants (share distribution phase); and later 2) the participants in some authorised subset send their share information to a combiner (secret reconstruction phase). While problems on storage required for participants, for example, the size of shares, have been well studied, problems regarding the communication complexity of the two distribution phases seem to have been mostly neglected in the literature so far. In this correspondence, we deal with several communication related problems in the secret reconstruction phase. Firstly, we show that there is a tradeoff between the communication costs and the number of participants involved in the secret reconstruction. We introduce the communication rate as the ratio of the secret size and the total number of communication bits transmitted from the participants to the combiner in the secret reconstruction phase. We derive a lower bound on the communication rate and give constructions that meet the bound. Secondly, we show that the point-to-point secure communication channels for participants to send share information to the combiner can be replaced with partial broadcast channels. We formulate partial broadcast channels as set systems and show that they are equivalent to the well-known combinatorial objects of cover-free family. Surprisingly, we find that the number of partial broadcast channels can be significantly reduced from the number of point-to-point secure channels. Precisely, in its optimal form, the number of channels can be reduced from n to O(log n), where n is the number of participants in a secret sharing scheme. We also study the communication rates of partial broadcast channels for the secret reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this correspondence, iteration-1 of bit flipping decoding based on a set of nonorthogonal check sums is analyzed for both regular and irregular models. In particular, the tradeoff between the Hamming weight (and overlapping) of the check sums and the number of redundant check sums required to start converging under iterative decoding is investigated. The model is then applied to an iterative attack of McEliece public-key cryptosystem since a successful attack of this system can be achieved by algebraic bounded distance decoding of a random code. Based on this model, the attack can be decomposed into two phases: a preprocessing phase which, for one particular key κ, consists of finding a sufficiently large set S of check sums up to a certain Hamming weight, and a bit flipping decoding phase which uses the set S for each message encrypted with the key κ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]