Concatenating Indicators of Flats for Designing Cryptographic Functions

Boolean functions with good cryptographic characteristics are needed for the design of robust pseudo-random generators for stream ciphers and of S-boxes for block ciphers. Very few general constructions of such cryptographic Boolean functions are known. The main ones correspond to concatenating affine or quadratic functions. We introduce a general construction corresponding to the concatenation of indicators of flats. We show that the functions it permits to design can present very good cryptographic characteristics.