International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Multiplicative complexity is a complexity measure defined

as the minimum number of AND gates required to implement a given primitive by a circuit over the basis (AND, XOR, NOT). Implementations of ciphers with a small number of AND gates are preferred in protocols for fully homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs. In 2002, Fischer and Peralta showed that the number of $n$-variable Boolean functions with multiplicative complexity one equals $2\\binom{2^n}{3}$. In this paper, we study Boolean functions with multiplicative complexity 2. By characterizing the structure of these functions in terms of affine equivalence relations, we provide a closed form formula for the number of Boolean functions with multiplicative complexity 2.