Further investigations on permutation based constructions of bent functions

Abstract

Constructing bent functions by composing a Boolean function with a permutation was introduced by Hou and Langevin in 1997. The approach appears simple but heavily depends on the construction of desirable permutations. In this paper, we further study this approach by investigating the exponential sums of certain monomials and permutations. We propose several classes of bent functions from quadratic permutations and permutations with (generalized) Niho exponents, and also a class of bent functions from a generalization of the Maiorana-McFarland class. The relations among the proposed bent functions and the known families of bent function are studied. Numerical results show that our constructions include bent functions that are not contained in the completed Maiorana-McFarland class $M^{\#}$, the class ${\mathrm{PS}}_{ap}$ or the class $H$.