Exact relations between nonlinearity and algebraic immunity

We sharpen some lower bounds on the higher order nonlinearity of a Boolean function in terms of the value of its algebraic immunity and obtain new tight bounds. We prove a universal tight lower bound, which enables us to reduce the problem of estimating higher order nonlinearity to finding the dimension of certain linear subspaces in the space of Boolean functions. As a simple corollary of this result, we obtain all previously known estimates in this area. For polynomials with disjoint terms, finding the dimension of those linear subspaces reduces to a simple combinatorial inspection. We prove a tight lower bound on the second order nonlinearity of a Boolean function in terms of the value of its algebraic immunity.