Several Families of Binary Minimal Linear Codes From Two-to-One Functions

Minimal linear codes have important applications in secure communications, including in the framework of secret sharing schemes and secure multi-party computation. A lot of research have been carried out to derive codes with few weights (but more importantly, being minimal) using algebraic or geometric approaches. One of the main power and fructify algebraic methods is based on the design of those codes by employing functions over finite fields. Li et al. (2021) have recently identified some binary linear codes with few weights from two classes of two-to-one functions. In this paper, our ultimate objective is to expand the class of codes derived from the paper of Li et al. by proposing larger classes of binary linear codes with few weights via generic constructions involving other known families of two-to-one functions over the finite field <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbb {F}_{2^{n}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of order <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2^{n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We succeed in constructing such codes, and we also completely determine their weight distributions. The linear codes presented in this paper differ in parameters from those known in the literature. Besides, some of them are optimal concerning the well-known Griesmer bound. Notably, we prove that our codes are either optimal or almost optimal with respect to the online Database of Grassl. We next observe that the derived binary linear codes also have the minimality property for most cases. We then describe the access structures of the secret-sharing schemes based on their dual codes. Finally, we solve two problems left open in the paper by Li et al. (more specifically, a complete solution to Problem 2 and a partial solution to Problem 1).