On Correlation Immune Boolean Functions With Minimum Hamming Weight Power of 2

The notion of correlation immune functions has been introduced by Siegenthaler (1984) in symmetric cryptography in the framework of stream ciphers. At the conference CRYPTO’91 by Camion et al., it has been pointed out that this notion existed in statistics and combinatorics. It has recently been highlighted that such functions also play an important role in a new framework related to side-channel attack counter-measures. Since then, the interest in correlation immune Boolean functions has been renewed, and new challenges regarding these functions have appeared. Specifically, low Hamming weight correlation immune functions have been selected as useful for counter-measures to side-channel attacks. Despite their importance, the literature is not abundant in this research direction. Two very interesting articles in which such correlation immune functions were nicely explored, given this novel use of them. Carlet initiated the first one in 2013, and the second one is due to Carlet and Chen (2018). This paper deals with correlation immune Boolean functions aiming to produce more candidates of those processing low Hamming weights. We shall focus on correlation immune Boolean functions with Hamming weights power of 2 (which offer a flexibility to control the correlation immunity aspects) and present several methods of designing them. Some design methods are efficient and could be employed to derive such functions. Consequently, given two positive integers <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , we derive new effective constructions of correlation immune Boolean functions with Hamming weight power of 2. Furthermore, an upper bound on the correlation immunity of the newly constructed <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -variable Boolean functions with Hamming weight <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2^{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> was determined for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n-m\ge 0$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Besides, exact values and lower bounds on the maximum correlation immunity of those functions are explored and discussed, mainly when the values of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$ </tex-math></inline-formula> are very close. This paper also exhibits explicit examples of those correlation immune functions that illustrate our methods.