Boolean functions are usually studied under the assumption that each input bit is considered independent and identically distributed. However, in the case of some stream ciphers, a keystream bit is generated by using a nonlinear Boolean function with inputs from a restricted domain. At Eurocrypt 2016, one such stream cipher (FLIP) has been proposed, where a Boolean function on n variables was exploited with inputs of weight n/2 only. Recently, Carlet et al. studied several properties of such functions and obtained certain bounds on linear approximations of direct sum in the restricted domain. In this paper, we observe that for a direct sum like f = f1+ f2, the inputs to each sub-function f1, f2do not follow a uniform distribution in the restricted domain. In this regard, we study the properties of the Boolean functions by considering a general probability distribution on the inputs. We further obtain several bounds related to the biases of direct sums. Finally, we obtain a lower bound on the bias of the nonlinear filter function of FLIP. Our results provide a general framework to study security parameters of ciphers over restricted domain.

Very recently, a class of cryptographically significant Boolean functions were constructed by Tang and Maitra [ IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 64 (2018), pp. 393--402] by modifying the $\mathcal{PS}_{ap}$ class of bent functions. The basic ideas used in Tang--Maitra construction were derived from a modification of a subclass of bent functions which is defined over the finite field, and a concern was raised in the same paper whether the implementation of such functions will be as efficient as that of Maiorana--McFarland type bent functions. In this paper, we look at the concrete realization of such functions over a vector space and answer the question positively. The first part of this paper investigates how the finite field implementation of the functions can be viewed as simple truth tables. Next, we present a completely new construction that itself starts from Maiorana--McFarland bent functions which are straightforward concatenations of linear functions.

Two (so-called 𝒞, D) classes of permutation-based bent Boolean functions were introduced by Carlet [4] two decades ago, but without specifying some explicit construction methods for their construction (apart from the subclass 𝒟 0 ). In this article, we look in more detail at the 𝒞 class, and derive some existence and nonexistence results concerning the bent functions in the 𝒞 class for many of the known classes of permutations over 𝔽 2 n . Most importantly, the existence results induce generic methods of constructing bent functions in class 𝒞 which possibly do not belong to the completed Maiorana-McFarland class. The question whether the specific permutations and related subspaces we identify in this article indeed give bent functions outside the completed Maiorana-McFarland class remains open.