Correlation-Immune and Resilient Functions Over a Finite Alphabet and Their Applications in Cryptography

We extend the notions of correlation-immune functions and resilient functions to functions over any finite alphabet. A previous result due to Gopalakrishnan and Stinson is generalized as we give an orthogonal array characterization, a Fourier transform and a matrix characterization for correlation-immune and resilient functions over any finite alphabet endowed with the structure of an Abelian group. We then point out the existence of a tradeoff between the degree of the algebraic normal form and the correlation-immunity order of any function defined on a finite field and we construct some infinite families of t-resilient functions with optimal nonlinearity which are particularly well-suited for combining linear feedback shift registers. We also point out the link between correlation-immune functions and some cryptographic objects as perfect local randomizers and multipermutations.