The Relationship Between Propagation Characteristics and Nonlinearity of Cryptographic Functions

The connections among the various nonlinearity criteria is currently an important topic in the area of designing and analyzing cryptographic functions. In this paper we show a quantitative relationship between propagation characteristics and nonlinearity, two critical indicators of the cryptographic strength of a Boolean function. We also present a tight lower bound on the nonlinearity of a cryptographic function that has propagation characteristics.