The crooked property

Crooked permutations were introduced twenty years ago to construct interesting objects in graph theory. These functions, over ${\mathbb{F}}_{2^n}$ with odd n, are such that their derivatives have as image set a complement of a hyperplane. The field of applications was extended later, in particular to cryptography. However binary crooked functions are rare. It is still unknown if non quadratic crooked functions do exist. We extend the concept and propose to study the crooked property for any characteristic. A function F, from ${\mathbb{F}}_{p^n}$ to itself, satisfies this property if all its derivatives have as image set an affine subspace. We show that the partially-bent vectorial functions and the functions satisfying the crooked property are strongly related. We later focus on the components of these functions, establishing that the existence of linear structures is here decisive. We then propose a symbolic approach to identify the linear structures. We claim that this problem consists in solving a system of linear equations, and can often be seen as a combinatorial problem.