On properties of translation groups in the affine general linear group with applications to cryptography (Q2216563)

Let \(V\) be a finite vector space and consider the affine linear group \(\mathrm{AGL}(V)\), that is, the semidirect product of the linear group \(\mathrm{GL}(V)\) with the translation group \(T\) of \(V\). It is well-known that any regular elementary abelian subgroup \({\mathcal T}\) of the symmetric group \(\mathrm{Sym}(V\)) is a conjugate of \(T\) under some \(g\) in \(\mathrm{Sym}(V\)), and it is easily seen that one can obtain an isomorphic vector space \(V'\) such that its affine linear group \(\mathrm{AGL}(V')\) is the corresponding conjugate of \(\mathrm{AGL}(V)\). As the translations play an important role in block ciphers, it is of cryptographic interest to study the situation just described more closely. In fact, groups \({\mathcal T}\) conjugate to \(T\) have applications in the cryptanalysis of block ciphers; a short introductory discussion is given in Section 2 of the paper under review. In this context, the authors study the situation where \({\mathcal T}\) is an affine group, that is, it is in fact a subgroup of \(\mathrm{AGL}(V)\). They present general results in Section 3, culminating in their Theorem 3.11 which provides a characterization when, conversely, \(T\) is also contained in \(\mathrm{AGL}(V')\). As shown in Section 4, which focuses on the case of particular cryptographic significance, namely binary vector spaces, this does not hold in general: here it fails whenever \(V\) has dimension at least 7, though it holds for smaller dimension. Section 4 also provides several counting results, giving bounds on the numbers of subgroups appearing in their Theorem 3.11, as well as a complete classification of the conjugacy classes of regular abelian subgroups of \(\mathrm{AGL}(V)\) when \(V\) has dimension at most 6.