International Association
for Cryptologic Research

It is proved that the construction and enumeration of the number of balanced symmetric functions over GF(p) are equivalent to solving an equation system and enumerating the solutions. Furthermore, we give an lower bound on number of balanced symmetric functions over GF(p), and the lower bound provides best known results.

The paper discusses the security of hash function with Merkle-Damg{\aa}rd construction and provides the complexity bound of finding a collision and primage of hash function based on the condition probability of compression function $y=F(x,k)$. we make a conclusion that in Merkle-Damma{\aa}rd construction, the requirement of free start collision resistant and free start collision resistant on compression function is not necessary and it is enough if the compression function with properties of fix start collision resistant and fix start preimage resistant. However, the condition probability $P_{Y|X=x}(y)$ and $P_{Y|K=k}(y)$ of compression function $y=F(x,k)$ have much influence on the security of the hash function. The best design of compression function should have properties of that $P_{Y|X=x}(y)$ and $P_{Y|K=k}(y)$ are both uniformly distributed for all $x$ and $k$. At the end of the paper, we discussed the block cipher based hash function, point out among the the 20 schemes, selected by PGV\cite{Re:Preneel} and BPS\cite{Re:JBlack}, the best scheme is block cipher itself, if the block cipher with perfect security and perfect key distribution.

This paper gives a construction method which can get a large class of Boolean functions with maximum algebraic immunity(AI) from one such giving function. Our constructions get more functions than any previous construction. The cryptographic properties, such as balance, algebraic degree etc, of those functions are studied. It shows that we can construct Boolean functions with better cryptographic properties, which gives the guidance for the design of Boolean functions to resist algebraic attack, and helps to design good cryptographic primitives of cryptosystems. From these constructions, we show that the count of the Boolean functions with maximum AI is bigger than ${2^{2^{n-1}}}$ for $n$ odd, bigger than ${2^{2^{n-1}+\frac{1}{2}\binom{n}{\frac{n}{2}} }}$ for $n$ even, which confirms the computer simulation result that such boolean functions are numerous. As far as we know, this is the first bound about this count.