Abstract
Linear codes are the most important family of codes in cryptography and coding theory. Some codes only have a few weights and are widely used in many areas, such as authentication codes, secret sharing schemes and strongly regular graphs. By setting , we constructed an infinite family of linear codes using two distinct weakly regular unbalanced (and balanced) plateaued functions with index . Their weight distributions were completely determined by applying exponential sums and Walsh transform. As a result, most of our constructed codes have a few nonzero weights and are minimal.
1. Introduction
Let p be a prime number and the finite field with p elements. We denote C to be a linear code over with parameters , which that means C is a subspace of dimension k with minimum distance d of the vector space . Compared with nonlinear codes, linear codes are easier to describe, encode and decode, due to their algebraic structure, so they have many applications in cryptography and communications. See [1] for more information about linear codes.
For a codeword , its weight is defined by
Then, the weight distribution of C is the sequence , where and stands for the number of codewords in C that have weight w, for , i.e.,
The code C is called t-weight if the number of nonzero for equals t. Linear codes with a few nonzero weights have attracted much attention in recent decades due to their wide applications in theory and practice, see [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Some linear codes are constructed from bent functions [6,12], square functions [13] and weakly regular plateaued functions [3,5,7].
In what follows, we always assume p is an odd prime. Now, let us introduce an efficient way to construct linear codes, which was proposed by Ding et al. [14]. Let and D be a subset of of size n. We define
where is the absolute trace function. It can be checked that is a linear code of length n. The set D is called the defining set of . This approach was generalized by Li et al. [15], who defined a class of codes by
where the defining set D is a subset of . Let . For p-ary functions f and g, we define
Based on [15], Wu et al. [16] offered new linear codes using the defining set , where f and g are weakly regular bent functions from to . Later, Cheng et al. in [3] introduced several linear codes of (1) with a few weights by considering f and g to be weakly regular unbalanced s-plateaued functions in the defining set , where . In 2022, Sınak [17] went deeper by choosing the weakly regular unbalanced and balanced -plateaued function f and -plateaued function g in , where . Very recently, Yang et al. [18] continued the research of [17] by considering two weakly regular balanced plateaued functions in the defining set , where . All of them studied the indexes of f and g among the set , that is, .
Along this research line, we further consider the index of , where . Let f and g be certain weakly regular unbalanced and balanced s-plateaued and t-plateaued functions, respectively, for . The defining set is denoted by
For clarity, we only concentrate on the case of and , since the case of and will lead to similar results (also, see Remark 3 for the case of ). In this paper, we consider the constructed codes of (1) and (2). In detail, we will completely determine their weight distributions using the theory of exponential sums and Walsh transform.
The rest of this paper is arranged as follows. We first present, in Section 2, an introduction to the mathematical foundations. Section 3 gives necessary results for our computation. Our main results are proposed in Section 4, where we study the weight distributions and the parameters of our constructed codes and their punctured ones. Section 5 shows the minimality and applications of these codes. Finally, the whole paper is concluded in Section 6.
2. Mathematical Background
In this section, let us have a quick glance at the mathematical background, including cyclotomic classes, cyclotomic fields, the theory of exponential sums and weakly regular plateaued functions. We recall that and . We denote by (resp. ) the set of square (resp. non-square) elements in .
2.1. Cyclotomic Classes and Cyclotomic Fields
Let be a fixed primitive element of and be a divisor of . For , the i-th cyclotomic classes of order N are defined by , where stands for the subgroup generated by .
The p-th cyclotomic field is denoted by , where . From [19], we know that the Galois group is given by , where the automorphism of K is defined by . Let be the quadratic character of . Then, , where .
2.2. Exponential Sums
We denote by the quadratic character of , where . Let be the quadratic Gauss sum over defined by
where is the canonical additive character, and Tr is the absolute trace function. It is well known that and .
For and , the Jacobsthal sum is defined by
We define
It is a companion sum related to Jacobsthal sums because , which is due to Theorem 5.50 in [20]. We can evaluate easily that and for all . In general, the sums can be described in terms of Jacobi sums.
Lemma 1
(Theorem 5.51, [20]). For all and , we have
where λ is a multiplicative character of of order , and is a Jacobi sum in .
Lemma 2
(Theorem 5.33, [20]). Let be odd and with . Then,
2.3. Weakly Regular Plateaued Functions
Let be a p-ary function. For , the Walsh transform of f is defined by
A function f is said to be balanced if ; otherwise, it is said to be unbalanced.
Plateaued functions in characteristic 2 were first studied by Zheng et al. [21] for cryptographic applications in 1999, and later in any general characteristic p by Mesnager [22] in 2014. Several years ago, Mesnager et al. presented the definition of (non-)weakly regular plateaued functions in their work [23]. We follow the notation used in [23]. A function f is s-plateaued if for each , where . Let be the Walsh support of f. In fact,
According to [22], the cardinality of is given by .
Definition 1
([23]). A function f is called weakly regular s-plateaued if there exists a complex number u, , such that
for all , where g is a p-ary function over satisfying for all . Otherwise, if u depends on β, then f is called non-weakly regular s-plateaued.
Lemma 3
(Lemma 5, [23]). Let and f a weakly regular s-plateaued function. For every , we have
where is the sign of and is a p-ary function over with for all . We call the dual function of f.
In 2020, Mesnager and Sınak [5,7] defined two subclasses of weakly regular plateaued functions.
Definition 2
([5,7]). Let f be a weakly regular unbalanced (resp. balanced) s-plateaued function with . We denote by WRP (resp. WRPB) the subclass of the unbalanced (resp. balanced) functions f that meet the following homogeneous conditions simultaneously:
- 1.
- ;
- 2.
- There exists a positive integer , such that , and for every .
Remark 1.
It is clear that (resp. ) whenever (resp. ).
The following lemmas, due to [5,17], play a significant role in the following calculation.
Lemma 4
(Lemma 6, [5]). Let or with , where . Then, for , we have if , and otherwise, we have .
Lemma 5
(Propositions 2 and 3, [5]). Let or with , where . Then, and for all , where and . We call the index of f.
Remark 2.
According to Lemma 5, if we take , then we must have .
Lemma 6
(Lemma 10, [5]). Let or with , where . For , we define
When ,
Otherwise,
Lemma 7
(Lemma 3.12, [17]). Let or with and , where and . We define
Then, we have
Lemma 8
(Lemma 3.7, [17]). We write , where is defined by (2) and are given in Lemma 7. If , then . If , then
3. Auxiliary Results
To ensure that the frequency of each weight appears in our codes, we will need the following lemmas.
Lemma 9.
Let . For the quadratic character η over , we have
Proof.
We note that if , and otherwise, if . Thus,
The first assertion then follows from . The second one is analogously proved and is omitted here. □
Lemma 10.
Let and be given as Lemma 7. We suppose that is odd. We write and
Then, if and , we have
Otherwise, if and , we have
Proof.
We only calculate for the case and . Let , , where . So, , and consequently,
where and are computed in Lemma 6. It follows that
where
We observe that in (3). If we write , then, from Lemma 6,
The desired assertion then follows from Lemmas 6 and 9. □
4. Main Results
In this section, we will give our main results of the weight distributions of the desired linear codes defined by (1) and (2). Let us fix some notation that will be used throughout this section. Let and or . For each and , we may assume from Lemma 3 that and , where and . The indexes of f and g are and such that and .
For , we define
In what follows, we always denote and for abbreviation purposes.
4.1. The Calculation of
The values of in (4) are stated in Lemmas 11–13.
Lemma 11.
Let or with . We suppose that and . We always have if . Otherwise, the following statements hold.
When ,
When and ,
When and ,
where is a companion sum determined in Lemma 1.
Proof.
Let . By Equation (4) and the orthogonal property of group characters,
where we write
It follows that
So, we always have when . Now, it is sufficient to determine . We observe from its definition that
Let . Obviously, when , by Lemma 4. Hence, or , and consequently, by (6),
When , then . By (6), Lemmas 3 and 5, we obtain
In the following, we will determine in (7) by considering the cases of and , separately.
The first case is that .
In this case, for every . By (7), we have
Now, let ; then, the proof is divided into two subcases.
Subcase (a): If , then . So, from (7),
Replacing by z in the last double sum above, we obtain from Lemma 2 that
Subcase (b): If , then . So, from (7),
We assume that . If , then the equation has exactly two solutions, and , in , where . Otherwise, if , then the inequality holds for all h in . Consequently, when ,
where is determined from Lemma 1. Thus, we conclude that
The desired conclusion then follows from (5), completing the proof. □
Lemma 12.
Let with . We suppose that and . We always have if . Otherwise, the following statements hold.
When , we have
When and , we have
When and , we have
Proof.
The proof is completed in a manner analogous to the previous lemma by noting that . Now, let . From (5)–(7),
where
It is sufficient to determine .
The first case is that .
Again, from (7), we have
The second case is that where we only need to consider two different subcases.
Subcase (a): If , then, from (7),
Subcase (b): If , then, from (7),
The value of is clear if . We now assume that . If ; then, the equation has exactly two solutions, and , in , where . Hence,
Otherwise, if , then the inequality holds for all h in . Thus,
So, we conclude that
The desired conclusion then follows from (5), completing the proof. □
Lemma 13.
Let with . We suppose that and . We always have if . Otherwise, the value of is presented in the following.
When , we have
When and , we have
When and , we have
Proof.
We note that for . From (5), , where is given in Lemma 12. This completes the proof. □
4.2. Weight Distributions of from or
The weight distributions of defined by (1) and (2) are given in the following theorems explicitly. We recall that the length of , denoted by n, is already settled in Lemma 8.
Theorem 1.
We suppose that , or with . Then, the code has parameters and its weight distribution is summarized in Table 1 if , in Table 2 if and and in Table 3 if and .
Table 1.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 1 when .
Table 2.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 1 when and .
Table 3.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 1 when and .
Proof.
From Lemma 8, the length is . Let and we write to be the weight of nonzero codewords . Clearly,
where is given by Lemma 11. To be more precise, if , then
For each , there are four different cases when the weight of does not equal .
When , we have
where the numbers and are computed in Lemma 10, and
with , , and and are given in Lemma 6. The weight distribution in Table 1 is then established.
When and , we have
The weight distribution in this case is concluded in Table 3. □
Theorem 2.
We suppose that and with . Then, is an linear code and the weight distribution is given in Table 4 if , in Table 5 if and and in Table 6 if and . Here, we set for brevity.
Table 4.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 2 when .
Table 5.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 2 when and .
Table 6.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 2 when and .
Proof.
The length of this code comes from Lemma 8. For , the weight can be obtained from Lemma 12. To be more explicit, when ,
The frequency of such codewords equals since . When , we will discuss four different cases.
Theorem 3.
We suppose that and with . Then, is a linear code with its weight distribution given in Table 7 if , in Table 8 if and and in Table 9 if and .
Table 7.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 3 when .
Table 8.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 3 when and .
Table 9.
The weight distribution of in Theorem 3 when and .
Proof.
We note that is not in since . This theorem can be derived in the same way as Theorem 2 by using Lemmas 6–8 and 13. We omitted the details here. □
Remark 3.
In Theorems 1, 2 and 3, we completely presented the weight distributions of for or with and , where . The case is not considered here, since the results for this case will be the same as for or and they were determined in [17] (see Tables 3, 4 and 6).
Remark 4.
For is odd, it is interesting to see that the codes have the same weight distributions whenever the functions are balanced or unbalanced. When is even and and , the weight distribution in Table 5 coincides with [17] (see Theorem 3.17, Table 5). If we set in Table 5, then the result coincides with [3] (see Theorem 4, Tables 9 and 10). When is even and and , the weight distribution in Table 8 coincides with [17] (see Theorem 3.21, Table 7). However, this is not the case for . Nevertheless, the index is not considered in the literature. Moreover, most of our results, such as Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 6, Table 7 and Table 9, are not contained in [3,17].
Now, we will provide some examples from weakly regular unbalanced plateaued functions to illustrate the results in Theorems 1 and 2.
Example 1.
Let be defined as and for a primitive element θ of . Then, with , , , , , and , where and . Actually, the function f is quadratic bent and its Walsh transform satisfies . From Magma programs, the code is a three-weight code with parameters and the weight enumerator . This is verified by Table 3 in Theorem 1 noting that , , and .
Example 2.
Let be defined as and . Then, with , , and . Their Walsh transforms satisfy and , where and . From Magma programs, the code is a three-weight code with parameters and the weight enumerator . This is verified by Table 6 in Theorem 2.
Example 3.
Let be defined as and for a primitive element θ of . Then, are quadratic bent functions in the set , with , , , , and , where and . From Magma programs, the code is a two-weight code with parameters and the weight enumerator . This is also verified by Table 6 in Theorem 2.
5. Minimality of the Codes and Their Applications
This section is devoted to analyzing the minimality of our codes defined by (1) and (2), and then applying them to construct secret sharing schemes.
A linear code C over is called minimal if every nonzero codeword solely covers its scalar multiples for . In 1998, Ashikhmin and Barg [24] provided a sufficient condition for a linear code to be minimal, that is,
where and represent the minimum and maximum nonzero weights, respectively.
Now, we will show the minimality of the constructed linear codes in Theorems 1–3.
Theorem 4.
It should be noted that the minimum distance of equals 2 since there are two linearly dependent entries in each codeword in . Additionally, under the framework stated in [25,26], the minimal codes described in Theorem 4 can be employed to construct secret sharing schemes with good access structure.
Theorem 5
(Proposition 2, [26]). Let C be an code over , and let be its generator matrix. If C is minimal, then in the secret sharing schemes based on the dual code , there are altogether minimal access sets. In addition, we have the following assertions:
- (1)
- If is a multiple of , , then participant must be in every minimal access set. Such a participant is called a dictatorial participant.
- (2)
- If is not a multiple of , , then participant must be in out of minimal access sets.
According to Theorem 5, we give the following example for secret sharing schemes.
Example 4.
Let be defined as and . Then, with , and . From Table 6 in Theorem 2, the code is a three-weight code with parameters and the weight enumerator . So, is minimal by Theorem 4. Let be the generator matrix of . Then, in the secret sharing scheme based on the dual code , there are altogether 78,125 minimal access sets. In addition, we have the following assertions:
- (1)
- If is a multiple of , 90,623, then participant must be in every minimal access set and is a dictatorial participant.
- (2)
- If is not a multiple of , 90,623, then participant must be in 62,500 out of 78,125 minimal access sets.
6. Conclusions
In the literature, linear codes from weakly regular plateaued functions with index 2 and have been extensively studied, where p is a general prime number, see [3,16,17,18] and the references therein. However, the index of has not been considered before. In this paper, we took and studied the construction of new linear codes from two weakly regular plateaued functions with new indexes 2, and . By calculating the exponential sums carefully, we succeeded in determining their weight distributions, as we had described in Theorems 1–3. Moreover, most of our codes are minimal and so they are suitable for designing secret sharing schemes. It should be noted that all the examples we gave are chosen from weakly regular unbalanced plateaued functions. Unfortunately, we have not found any weakly regular balanced plateaued functions until now. It would be very nice if someone found such a function in the future.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, S.Y. and T.Z.; methodology, S.Y.; validation, T.Z. and Z.-a.Y.; writing—original draft preparation, S.Y.; writing—review and editing, S.Y. and T.Z.; visualization, Z.-a.Y.; supervision, S.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding
This research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 12071247, 12126609, 11971496), National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2020YFA0712500), Research and Innovation Fund for Graduate Dissertations of Qufu Normal University (No. LWCXS202251).
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
Data is contained within the article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
References
- Huffman, W.; Pless, V. Fundamentals of Error Correcting Codes; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2003. [Google Scholar]
- Calderbank, A.R.; Goethals, J.M. Three-weight codes and association schemes. Philips J. Res. 1984, 39, 143–152. [Google Scholar]
- Cheng, Y.J.; Cao, X.W. Linear codes with few weights from weakly regular plateaued functions. Discret. Math. 2021, 344, 112597. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Kong, X.L.; Yang, S.D. Complete weight enumerators of a class of linear codes with two or three weights. Discret. Math. 2019, 342, 3166–3176. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Mesnager, S.; Sınak, A. Several classes of minimal linear codes with few weights from weakly regular plateaued functions. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2020, 66, 2296–2310. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Özbudak, F.; Pelen, R.M. Two or three weight linear codes from non-weakly regular bent functions. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2022, 68, 3014–3027. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Sınak, A. Minimal linear codes from weakly regular plateaued balanced functions. Discret. Math. 2021, 344, 112215. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Yang, S.D. Complete weight enumerators of linear codes based on Weil sums. IEEE Commun. Lett. 2021, 25, 346–350. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Zhang, T.H.; Lu, H.; Yang, S.D. Two-weight and three-weight linear codes constructed from Weil sums. Math. Found. Comput. 2022, 5, 129–144. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Zheng, D.B.; Zhao, Q.; Wang, X.Q.; Zhang, Y. A class of two or three weights linear codes and their complete weight enumerators. Discret. Math. 2021, 344, 112355. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Heng, Z.L.; Li, D.X.; Du, J.; Chen, F.L. A family of projective two-weight linear codes. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 2021, 89, 1993–2007. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Tang, C.M.; Li, N.; Qi, Y.F.; Zhou, Z.C.; Helleseth, T. Linear codes with two or three weights from weakly regular bent functions. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2016, 62, 1166–1176. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Tang, C.M.; Qi, Y.F.; Huang, D.M. Two-weight and three-weight linear codes from square functions. IEEE Commun. Lett. 2016, 20, 29–32. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Ding, C.S.; Niederreiter, H. Cyclotomic linear codes of order 3. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2007, 53, 2274–2277. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Li, C.J.; Yue, Q.; Fu, F.W. A construction of several classes of two-weight and three-weight linear codes. Appl. Algebra Eng. Commun. Comput. 2017, 28, 11–30. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Wu, Y.N.; Li, N.; Zeng, X.Y. Linear codes with few weights from cyclotomic classes and weakly regular bent functions. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 2020, 88, 1255–1272. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Sınak, A. Construction of minimal linear codes with few weights from weakly regular plateaued functions. Turk. J. Math. 2022, 46, 953–972. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Yang, S.D.; Zhang, T.H.; Li, P. Linear codes from two weakly regular plateaued balanced functions. Entropy 2023, 25, 369. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Ireland, K.; Rosen, M. A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory; Springer: New York, NY, USA, 1990. [Google Scholar]
- Lidl, R.; Niederreiter, H. Finite Fields; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1997. [Google Scholar]
- Zheng, Y.L.; Zhang, X.M. Plateaued functions. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communications Security, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 9–11 November 1999; Springer: New York, NY, USA, 1999; pp. 284–300. [Google Scholar]
- Mesnager, S. Characterizations of plateaued and bent functions in characteristic p. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Sequences and Their Applications, SETA-2014, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 24–28 November 2014; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2014; pp. 72–82. [Google Scholar]
- Mesnager, S.; Özbudak, F.; Sınak, A. Linear codes from weakly regular plateaued functions and their secret sharing schemes. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 2019, 87, 463–480. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Ashikhmin, A.; Barg, A. Minimal vectors in linear codes. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 1998, 44, 2010–2017. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Ding, C.S.; Yuan, J. Covering and secret sharing with linear codes. In Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2003; pp. 11–25. [Google Scholar]
- Yuan, J.; Ding, C.S. Secret sharing schemes from three classes of linear codes. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2006, 52, 206–212. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).