Abstract Recently, many cryptographic primitives such as homomorphic encryption (HE), multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols have been proposed in the literature which operate on the prime field $${\mathbb {F}}_p$$ F p for some large prime p. Primitives that are designed using such operations are called arithmetization-oriented primitives. As the concept of arithmetization-oriented primitives is new, a rigorous cryptanalysis of such primitives is yet to be done. In this paper, we investigate arithmetization-oriented APN functions. More precisely, we investigate APN permutations in the CCZ-classes of known families of APN power functions over the prime field $${\mathbb {F}}_p$$ F p . Moreover, we present a class of binomial permutation having differential uniformity at most 5 defined via the quadratic character over finite fields of odd characteristic. Computationally it is confirmed that the latter family contains new APN permutations for some small parameters. We conjecture it to contain an infinite subfamily of APN permutations.

The Difference Distribution Table (DDT) and the differential uniformity play a major role for the design of substitution boxes in block ciphers, since they indicate the function’s resistance against differential cryptanalysis. This concept was extended recently to$c$-DDT and$c$-differential uniformity, which have the potential of extending differential cryptanalysis. Recently, a new theoretical tool, the Boomerang Connectivity Table (BCT) and the corresponding boomerang uniformity were introduced to quantify the resistance of a block cipher against boomerang-style attacks. Here we concentrate on two classes (introduced recently) of permutation polynomials over finite fields of even characteristic. For one of these, which is an involution used to construct a 4-uniform permutation, we explicitly determine the$c$-DDT entries and BCT entries. For the second type of function, which is a differentially 4-uniform function, we give bounds for its$c$-differential and boomerang uniformities.