A lower bound for differential uniformity by multiplicative complexity & bijective functions of multiplicative complexity 1 over finite fields

Abstract

The multiplicative complexity of an S-box over a finite field is the minimum number of multiplications needed to implement the S-box as an arithmetic circuit. In this paper we fully characterize bijective S-boxes with multiplicative complexity 1 up to affine equivalence over any finite field. We show that under affine equivalence in odd characteristic there are two classes of bijective functions and in even characteristic there are three classes of bijective functions with multiplicative complexity 1. Moreover, in (Jeon et al., Cryptogr. Commun., 14(4), 849-874 (2022)) A-boxes where introduced to lower bound the differential uniformity of an S-box over $$\mathbb {F}_{2}^{n}$$ F 2 n via its multiplicative complexity. We generalize this concept to arbitrary finite fields. In particular, we show that the differential uniformity of a (n, m)-S-box over $$\mathbb {F}_{q}$$ F q is at least $$q^{n - l}$$ q n - l , where $$\lfloor \frac{n - 1}{2} \rfloor + l$$ ⌊ n - 1 2 ⌋ + l is the multiplicative complexity of the S-box.