Binary linear codes from vectorial boolean functions and their weight distribution

Binary linear codes with good parameters have important applications in secret sharing schemes, authentication codes, association schemes, and consumer electronics and communications. In this paper, we construct several classes of binary linear codes from vectorial Boolean functions and determine their parameters, by further studying a generic construction developed by Ding et al. recently. First, by employing perfect nonlinear functions and almost bent functions, we obtain several classes of six-weight linear codes which contain the all-one codeword, and determine their weight distribution. Second, we investigate a subcode of any linear code mentioned above and consider its parameters. When the vectorial Boolean function is a perfect nonlinear function or a Gold function in odd dimension, we can completely determine the weight distribution of this subcode. Besides, our linear codes have larger dimensions than the ones by Ding et al.’s generic construction.     

An Assmus–Mattson-Type Approach for Identifying 3-Designs from Linear Codes over Z 4

The complete weight enumerator of the Delsarte–Goethals code over Z ₄ is derived and an Assmus–Mattson-type approach at identifying t-designs in linear codes over Z ₄ is presented. The Assmus–Mattson-type approach, in conjunction with the complete weight enumerator are together used to show that the codewords of constant Hamming weight in both the Goethals code over Z ₄ as well as the Delsarte–Goethals code over Z ₄ yield 3-designs, possibly with repeated blocks.     

Infinite families of 3-designs from a type of five-weight code

It has been known for a long time that t-designs can be employed to construct both linear and nonlinear codes and that the codewords of a fixed weight in a code may hold a t-design. While a lot of progress in the direction of constructing codes from t-designs has been made, only a small amount of work on the construction of t-designs from codes has been done. The objective of this paper is to construct infinite families of 2-designs and 3-designs from a type of binary linear codes with five weights. The total number of 2-designs and 3-designs obtained in this paper are exponential in any odd m and the block size of the designs varies in a huge range.     

New Extremal Type II Codes Over ℤ4

Recently Type II codes over ℤ₄ have been introduced as self-dual codes containing the all-one vector with the property that all Euclidean weights are divisible by eight. The notion of extremality for the Euclidean weight has been also given. In this paper, we give two methods for constructing Type II codes over ℤ₄. By these methods, new extremal Type II codes of lengths 16, 24, 32 and 40 are constructed from weighing matrices.     

The preparata codes and a class of 4-designs

An extension theorem for t-designs is proved. As an application, a class of 4-(4^m + 1,5,2) designs is constructed by extending designs related to the 3-designs formed by the minimum weight vectors in the Preparata code of length n = 4^m, m ≥ 2. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Optimal constant weight covering codes and nonuniform group divisible 3-designs with block size four

Let K _q (n, w, t, d) be the minimum size of a code over Z _q of length n, constant weight w, such that every word with weight t is within Hamming distance d of at least one codeword. In this article, we determine K _q (n, 4, 3, 1) for all n ≥ 4, q = 3, 4 or q = 2 ^m  + 1 with m ≥ 2, leaving the only case (q, n) = (3, 5) in doubt. Our construction method is mainly based on the auxiliary designs, H-frames, which play a crucial role in the recursive constructions of group divisible 3-designs similar to that of candelabra systems in the constructions of 3-wise balanced designs. As an application of this approach, several new infinite classes of nonuniform group divisible 3-designs with block size four are also constructed.     

5-Designs from the lifted Golay code over Z4 via an Assmus–Mattson type approach

Recently, Harada showed that the codewords of Hamming weight 10 in the lifted quaternary Golay code form a 5-design. The codewords of Hamming weight 12 in the lifted Golay code are of two symmetric weight enumerator (swe) types. The codewords of each of the two swe types were also shown by Harada to form a 5-design. While Harada's results were obtained via computer search, a subsequent analytical proof of these results appears in a paper by Bonnecaze, Rains and Sole. Here we provide an alternative analytical proof, using an Assmus–Mattson type approach, that the codewords of Hamming weight 12 in the lifted Golay code of each symmetric weight enumerator type, form a 5-design.Also included in the paper is the weight hierarchy of the lifted Golay code. The generalized Hamming weights are used to distinguish between simple 5-designs and those with repeated blocks.     

Infinite families of 2-designs and 3-designs from linear codes

The interplay between coding theory and $t$-designs started many years ago. While every $t$-design yields a linear code over every finite field, the largest $t$ for which an infinite family of $t$-designs is derived directly from a linear or nonlinear code is $t=3$. Sporadic $4$-designs and $5$-designs were derived from some linear codes of certain parameters. The major objective of this paper is to construct many infinite families of $2$-designs and $3$-designs from linear codes. The parameters of some known $t$-designs are also derived. In addition, many conjectured infinite families of $2$-designs are also presented.     

Weight distribution of Preparata codes over Z 4 and the construction of 3-designs

In this paper,we calculate the number of the codewords(with Hamming weight 7)of each type in the Preparata codes over Z4,then give the parameter sets of 3-designs constructed from the supports of the codewords of each type.Moreover,we prove that the first two families of 3-designs are simple and the third family of the 3-designs has repeated blocks.     

On the construction of prefix-free and fix-free codes with specified codeword compositions

We investigate the construction of prefix-free and fix-free codes with specified codeword compositions. We present a polynomial time algorithm which constructs a fix-free code with the same codeword compositions as a given code for a special class of codes called distinct codes. We consider the construction of optimal fix-free codes which minimize the average codeword cost for general letter costs with uniform distribution of the codewords and present an approximation algorithm to find a near optimal fix-free code with a given constant cost.     

On constant composition codes

A constant composition code over a k-ary alphabet has the property that the numbers of occurrences of the k symbols within a codeword is the same for each codeword. These specialize to constant weight codes in the binary case, and permutation codes in the case that each symbol occurs exactly once. Constant composition codes arise in powerline communication and balanced scheduling, and are used in the construction of permutation codes. In this paper, direct and recursive methods are developed for the construction of constant composition codes.     

A note on the Newton radius

The Newton radius of a code is the largest weight of a uniquely correctable error. We establish a lower bound for the Newton radius in terms of the rate. In particular we show that in any family of linear codes of rate below one half, the Newton radius increases linearly with the codeword length.     

A construction of mutually disjoint Steiner systems from isomorphic Golay codes

It is well known that the extended binary Golay [24,12,8] code yields 5-designs. In particular, the supports of all the weight 8 codewords in the code form a Steiner system S(5,8,24). In this paper, we give a construction of mutually disjoint Steiner systems S(5,8,24) by constructing isomorphic Golay codes. As a consequence, we show that there exists at least 22 mutually disjoint Steiner systems S(5,8,24). Finally, we prove that there exists at least 46 mutually disjoint 5-(48,12,8) designs from the extended binary quadratic residue [48,24,12] code.     

Antichain Codes

We show that almost all codes satisfy an antichain condition. This states that the minimum length of a two dimensional subcode of a code C increases if the subcode is constrained to contain a minimum weight codeword. In particular, almost no code satisfies the chain condition. In passing, we study the typical behaviour of codes with respect to generalized distances and show that almost all lie on a generalized Varshamov-Gilbert bound.     

Maximal Weight Divisors of Projective Reed-Muller Codes

Projective Reed-Muller (PRM) codes, as the name suggests, are the projective analogues of generalized Reed-Muller codes. The parameters are known, and small steps have been taken towards pinning down the codeword weights that occur in any PRM code. We determine, for any PRM code, the greatest common divisor of its codeword weights.     

Improved algorithms for finding low-weight polynomial multiples in \mathbb {F}_{2}^{}[x] and some cryptographic applications

In this paper we present an improved algorithm for finding low-weight multiples of polynomials over the binary field using coding theoretic methods. The associated code defined by the given polynomial has a cyclic structure, allowing an algorithm to search for shifts of the sought minimum-weight codeword. Therefore, a code with higher dimension is constructed, having a larger number of low-weight codewords and through some additional processing also reduced minimum distance. Applying an algorithm for finding low-weight codewords in the constructed code yields a lower complexity for finding low-weight polynomial multiples compared to previous approaches. As an application, we show a key-recovery attack against  that has a lower complexity than the chosen security level indicate. Using similar ideas we also present a new probabilistic algorithm for finding a multiple of weight 4, which is faster than previous approaches. For example, this is relevant in correlation attacks on stream ciphers.     

Relative <Emphasis Type="Italic">t</Emphasis>-designs in binary Hamming association scheme <Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis>(<Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>, 2)

A relative t-design in the binary Hamming association schemes H(n, 2) is equivalent to a weighted regular t-wise balanced design, i.e., certain combinatorial t-design which allows different sizes of blocks and a weight function on blocks. In this paper, we study relative t-designs in H(n, 2), putting emphasis on Fisher type inequalities and the existence of tight relative t-designs. We mostly consider relative t-designs on two shells. We prove that if the weight function is constant on each shell of a relative t-design on two shells then the subset in each shell must be a combinatorial \((t-1)\)-design. This is a generalization of the result of Kageyama who proved this under the stronger assumption that the weight function is constant on the whole block set. Using this, we define tight relative t-designs for odd t, and a strong restriction on the possible parameters of tight relative t-designs in H(n, 2). We obtain a new family of such tight relative t-designs, which were unnoticed before. We will give a list of feasible parameters of such relative 3-designs with \(n \le 100\), and then we discuss the existence and/or the non-existence of such tight relative 3-designs. We also discuss feasible parameters of tight relative 4-designs on two shells in H(n, 2) with \(n \le 50\). In this study we come up with the connection on the topics of classical design theory, such as symmetric 2-designs (in particular 2-\((4u-1,2u-1,u-1)\) Hadamard designs) and Driessen’s result on the non-existence of certain 3-designs. We believe Problems 1 and 2 presented in Sect. 5.2 open a new way to study relative t-designs in H(n, 2). We conclude our paper listing several open problems.     

3-Designs from the Z 4-Goethals Codes via a New Kloosterman Sum Identity

Recently, active research has been performed on constructing t-designs from linear codes over Z ₄. In this paper, we will construct a new simple 3 – (2 ^m , 7, 14/3 (2 ^m – 8)) design from codewords of Hamming weight 7 in the Z ₄-Goethals code for odd m 5. For 3 arbitrary positions, we will count the number of codewords of Hamming weight 7 whose support includes those 3 positions. This counting can be simplified by using the double-transitivity of the Goethals code and divided into small cases. It turns out interestingly that, in almost all cases, this count is related to the value of a Kloosterman sum. As a result, we can also prove a new Kloosterman sum identity while deriving the 3-design.     

Construction of 3-designs using parallelism

This paper concerns recursive constructions for simple 3-designs. These are generalization of several recent results obtained by the author. The methods are based on 3-designs having a parallelism and prove to be very useful. Illustrative applications are included to demonstrate their surprising strength and as a result new infinite families of 3-designs are constructed.     

On the locality of quasi-cyclic codes over finite fields

Designs, Codes and Cryptography - A code is said to have locality r if any coordinate value in a codeword of that code can be recovered by at most r other coordinates. In this paper, we have...