A Novel Application of Boolean Functions with High Algebraic Immunity in Minimal Codes

Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity are important cryptographic primitives in some stream ciphers. In this paper, two methodologies for constructing binary minimal codes from sets, Boolean functions and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity are proposed. More precisely, a general construction of new minimal codes using minimal codes contained in Reed-Muller codes and sets without nonzero low degree annihilators is presented. The other construction allows us to yield minimal codes from certain subcodes of Reed-Muller codes and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity. Via these general constructions, infinite families of minimal binary linear codes of dimension $m$ and length less than or equal to $m(m+1)/2$ are obtained. In addition, a lower bound on the minimum distance of the proposed minimal linear codes is established. Conjectures and open problems are also presented. The results of this paper show that Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity have nice applications in several fields such as symmetric cryptography, coding theory and secret sharing schemes

Further results on covering codes with radius R and codimension tR + 1

The length function $\ell_q(r,R)$ is the smallest possible length $n$ of a $q$-ary linear $[n,n-r]_qR$ code with codimension (redundancy) $r$ and covering radius $R$. Let $s_q(N,\rho)$ be the smallest size of a $\rho$-saturating set in the projective space $\mathrm{PG}(N,q)$. There is a one-to-one correspondence between $[n,n-r]_qR$ codes and $(R-1)$-saturating $n$-sets in $\mathrm{PG}(r-1,q)$ that implies $\ell_q(r,R)=s_q(r-1,R-1)$. In this work, for $R\ge3$, new asymptotic upper bounds on $\ell_q(tR+1,R)$ are obtained in the following form: $\hspace{0.7cm} \bullet~\ell_q(tR+1,R) =s_q(tR,R-1)\le \sqrt[R]{\frac{R!}{R^{R-2}}}\cdot q^{(r-R)/R}\cdot\sqrt[R]{\ln q}+o(q^{(r-R)/R}), \hspace{0.3cm}r=tR+1,~t\ge1,~ q\text{ is an arbitrary prime power},~q\text{ is large enough};$ $\hspace{0.7cm} \bullet~\text{ if additionally }R\text{ is large enough, then }\sqrt[R]{\frac{R!}{R^{R-2}}}\thicksim\frac{1}{e}\thickapprox0.3679.$ The new bounds are essentially better than the known ones. For $t=1$, a new construction of $(R-1)$-saturating sets in the projective space $\mathrm{PG}(R,q)$, providing sets of small sizes, is proposed. The $[n,n-(R+1)]_qR$ codes, obtained by the construction, have minimum distance $R + 1$, i.e. they are almost MDS (AMDS) codes. These codes are taken as the starting ones in the lift-constructions (so-called "$q^m$-concatenating constructions") for covering codes to obtain infinite families of codes with growing codimension $r=tR+1$, $t\ge1$.Comment: 24 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.1360

On regular sets of affine type in finite Desarguesian planes and related codes

In this paper, we consider point sets of finite Desarguesian planes whose multisets of intersection numbers with lines is the same for all but one exceptional parallel class of lines. We call such sets regular of affine type. When the lines of the exceptional parallel class have the same intersection numbers, then we call these sets regular of pointed type. Classical examples are e.g. unitals; a detailed study and constructions of such sets with few intersection numbers is due to Hirschfeld and Sz\H{o}nyi from 1991. We here provide some general construction methods for regular sets and describe a few infinite families. The members of one of these families have the size of a unital and meet affine lines of $\mathrm{PG}(2, q^2)$ in one of $4$ possible intersection numbers, each of them congruent to $1$ modulo $\sqrt{q}$. As a byproduct, we determine the intersection sizes of the Hermitian curve defined over $\mathrm{GF}(q^2)$ with suitable rational curves of degree $\sqrt{q}$ and we obtain $\sqrt{q}$-divisible codes with $5$ non-zero weights. We also determine the weight enumerator of the codes arising from the general constructions modulus some $q$-powers.Comment: 16 pages/revised and improved versio