On the confusion and diffusion properties of Maiorana-McFarland's and extended Maiorana-McFarland's functions (Q1827565)

It is well known that the resistance of symmetric cryptosystems to known attacks can be quantified through some parameters of the Boolean functions used there. From a practical point of view it is thus important to be able to construct Boolean functions satisfying some desired cryptographic criteria; moreover it is desirable to find constructions leading to reasonably large sets of such functions. In the paper such constructions and properties of the functions produced are studied. First, basic notions, criteria and results are briefly introduced. Then known constructions are reviewed in more detail and relevant results on their properties are shown. An extension of the basic construction is studied in a separate chapter, including a study of the behavior of the resulting functions with respect to the cryptographic criteria. At the end a new construction of bent functions is given.