Research on nonlinear invariants of a power function over a binary field

The nonlinear invariant attack is a new and powerful cryptanalytic method for lightweight block ciphers. The core step of such cryptanalytic method is to find the nonlinear invariant(s) of its cascade round. Generally, for an \(\varvec{n}\)-bit width function, the time complexity \(\varvec{O}(\textbf{2}^{\varvec{3n}})\) is needed to find its all nonlinear invariants. In this paper, for the positive integer \(\varvec{m}\), we consider the power function \(\varvec{x}^{\varvec{m}}\) over the finite field \(\varvec{GF}(\varvec{2}^{\varvec{n}})\), which is one of the most important cryptographic functions in recent decades. First, the nonlinear invariants of \(\varvec{x}^{\varvec{m}}\) is studied and we provide two mathematical toolboxes named \(\varvec{\sim }_{\varvec{m}}\) periodical point and \(\varvec{\sim }_{\varvec{m}}\) equivalence class. Second, we present an algorithm to get all the nonlinear invariants of \(\varvec{x}^{\varvec{m}}\) over \(\varvec{GF}(\varvec{2}^{\varvec{n}})\) at the cost of time complexity \(\varvec{O}(\frac{{\varvec{2}}^{\varvec{n}}\varvec{-1}}{\varvec{\gcd (2}^{\varvec{n}}\varvec{-1,m)}})\). If the growth of n exceeds our tolerance above, another method is provided to get parts of the nonlinear invariants of \(\varvec{x}^{\varvec{m}}\). Finally, we consider the nonlinear invariants of \(\varvec{x}^\textbf{3}\) over \(\varvec{GF(2}^{\varvec{129}})\) as an application, which is used in the block cipher MiMC. It seems impractical by existing methods. The results allow us to find several (but not all) nontrivial nonlinear invariants of such a function for the first time.