International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The paper is dealing with two important subclasses of plateaued functions: bent and semi-bent functions.

In the first part of the paper, we construct mainly bent and semi-bent functions in the Maiorana-McFarland class using Boolean functions having linear structures (linear translators) systematically. Although most of these results are rather direct applications of some recent results, using linear structures (linear translators) allows us to have certain flexibilities to control extra properties of these plateaued functions. In the second part of the paper, using the results of the first part and exploiting these flexibilities, we modify many secondary constructions. Therefore, we obtain new secondary constructions of bent and semi-bent functions not belonging to the Maiorana-McFarland class. Instead of using bent (semi-bent) functions as ingredients, our secondary constructions use only Boolean (vectorial Boolean) functions with linear structures (linear translators) which are very easy to choose. Moreover, all of them are very explicit and we also determine the duals of the bent functions in our constructions. We show how these linear structures should be chosen in order to satisfy the corresponding conditions coming from using derivatives and quadratic/cubic functions in our secondary constructions.