Several classes of bent functions over finite fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new class of bent functions over finite fields, generalizing previous results and providing conditions for their bentness, including constructions from non-bent functions like Gold functions.

Contribution

It generalizes existing work by characterizing bentness of functions combining a base function with trace polynomial components, and constructs bent functions from non-bent Gold functions.

Findings

Derived a generic Walsh transform formula for the class of functions.

Characterized bentness when the base function is bent for different primes.

Constructed new bent functions from non-bent Gold functions.

Abstract

Let $\mathbb{F}_{p^{n}}$ be the finite field with $p^n$ elements and $\operatorname{Tr}(\cdot)$ be the trace function from $\mathbb{F}_{p^{n}}$ to $\mathbb{F}_{p}$, where $p$ is a prime and $n$ is an integer. Inspired by the works of Mesnager (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 60(7): 4397-4407, 2014) and Tang et al. (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 63(10): 6149-6157, 2017), we study a class of bent functions of the form $f(x)=g(x)+F(\operatorname{Tr}(u_1x),\operatorname{Tr}(u_2x),\cdots,\operatorname{Tr}(u_{\tau}x))$, where $g(x)$ is a function from $\mathbb{F}_{p^{n}}$ to $\mathbb{F}_{p}$, $\tau\geq2$ is an integer, $F(x_1,\cdots,x_n)$ is a reduced polynomial in $\mathbb{F}_{p}[x_1,\cdots,x_n]$ and $u_i\in \mathbb{F}^{*}_{p^n}$ for $1\leq i \leq \tau$. As a consequence, we obtain a generic result on the Walsh transform of $f(x)$ and characterize the bentness of $f(x)$ when $g(x)$ is bent for $p=2$ and $p>2$ respectively. Our results generalize some earlier works. In addition, we study the construction of bent functions $f(x)$ when $g(x)$ is not bent for the first time and present a class of bent functions from non-bent Gold functions.