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The construction of (minimal) linear codes from functions has received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we derive several minimal codes from the sets of pre-images of weakly regular plateaued and bent functions over the odd characteristic finite fields. Based on the recent construction method, we obtain six-weight and seven-weight minimal codes from these functions. The Hamming weights in proposed codes are calculated from the character sums of the sets based on the Walsh spectrum of the employed functions, while the weight distributions of the codes are determined from both the sizes of the employed sets and the Walsh distributions of the employed functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimal linear codes have significant applications in secret sharing schemes and secure two-party computation. When they are defined over finite fields, those codes have been intensively studied, especially in recent years, but they have been firstly partially characterized by Ashikhmin and Barg since 1998. Next, they were completely characterized in 2018 by Ding, Heng, and Zhou in terms of the minimum and maximum nonzero weights in the corresponding codes. Since then, many construction methods for minimal linear codes over finite fields throughout algebraic and geometric approaches have been proposed in the literature. In particular, the algebraic approach gives rise to minimal codes from (cryptographic) functions. Linear codes over finite fields have been expanded into the collection of acceptable alphabets for codes and study codes over finite commutative rings. A natural way to extend the known results available in the literature is to consider minimal linear codes over commutative rings with unity. In extending coding theory to codes over rings, several essential principles must be considered. Particularly extending the minimality property from finite fields to rings and creating such codes is not simple. Such an extension offers more flexibility in the construction of minimal codes. The present article investigates one-dimensional minimal linear codes over the rings $\mathbb {Z}_{p^{n}}$ (where $p$ is a prime) and $\mathbb {Z}_{p^{m}q^{n}}$ (where $p < q$ are distinct primes and $m\leq n$). Our ultimate objective is to characterize such codes’ minimality and design minimal linear codes over the considered rings. Given our objective, we first introduced the notion of minimal codes over (commutative) rings and succeeded in deriving simple characterization of one-dimensional minimal linear codes over the underlying rings mentioned above. Our new algebraic approach allows designing new minimal linear codes. Almost minimal codes over rings are also presented. To the best of our knowledge, the present paper offers a wide variety of minimal codes over (commutative) rings for the first time. Novel perspectives and developments in this direction are expected in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes are a well-studied subclass of cyclic codes that have found numerous applications in error correction and notably in quantum information processing. They are widely used in data storage and communication systems. A subclass of attractive BCH codes is the narrow-sense BCH codes over the Galois field ${\mathrm {GF}}(q)$ with length $q+1$ , which are closely related to the action of the projective general linear group of degree two on the projective line. Despite its interest, not much is known about this class of BCH codes. This paper aims to study some of the codes within this class and specifically narrow-sense antiprimitive BCH codes (these codes are also linear complementary duals (LCD) codes that have interesting practical recent applications in cryptography, among other benefits). We shall use tools and combine arguments from algebraic coding theory, combinatorial designs, and group theory (group actions, representation theory of finite groups, etc.) to investigate narrow-sense antiprimitive BCH Codes and extend results from the recent literature. Notably, the dimension, the minimum distance of some $q$ -ary BCH codes with length $q+1$ , and their duals are determined in this paper. The dual codes of the narrow-sense antiprimitive BCH codes derived in this paper include almost MDS codes. Furthermore, the classification of ${\mathrm {PGL}}(2, p^{m})$ -invariant codes over ${\mathrm {GF}}(p^{h})$ is completed. As an application of this result, the $p$ -ranks of all incidence structures invariant under the projective general linear group ${\mathrm {PGL}}(2, p^{m})$ are determined. Furthermore, infinite families of narrow-sense BCH codes admitting a 3-transitive automorphism group are obtained. Via these BCH codes, a coding-theory approach to constructing the Witt spherical geometry designs is presented. The BCH codes proposed in this paper are good candidates for permutation decoding, as they have a relatively large group of automorphisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity are important cryptographic primitives in some stream ciphers. In this paper, two methodologies for constructing minimal binary codes from sets, Boolean functions and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity, are proposed. More precisely, a general construction of new minimal codes using minimal codes contained in Reed-Muller codes and sets without nonzero low degree annihilators is presented. The other construction allows us to yield minimal codes from certain subcodes of Reed-Muller codes and vectorial Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity. Via these general constructions, infinite families of minimal binary linear codes of dimension $m$ and length less than or equal to $m(m+1)/2$ are obtained. Besides, a lower bound on the minimum distance of the proposed minimal linear codes is established. Conjectures and open problems are also presented. The results of this paper show that Boolean functions with high algebraic immunity have nice applications in several fields additionally to symmetric cryptography, such as coding theory and secret sharing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-orthogonal codes are an important type of linear codes due to their wide applications in communication and cryptography. The Euclidean (or Hermitian) hull of a linear code is defined to be the intersection of the code and its Euclidean (or Hermitian) dual. It is clear that the hull is self-orthogonal. The main goal of this paper is to obtain self-orthogonal codes by investigating the hulls. Let $\mathcal {C}_{(r,r^{m}-1,\delta,b)}$ be the primitive BCH code over $\mathbb {F}_{r}$ of length $r^{m}-1$ with designed distance $\delta $ , where $\mathbb {F}_{r}$ is the finite field of order $r$. In this paper, we will present Euclidean (or Hermitian) self-orthogonal codes and determine their parameters by investigating the Euclidean (or Hermitian) hulls of some primitive BCH codes. Several sufficient and necessary conditions for primitive BCH codes with large Hermitian hulls are developed by presenting lower and upper bounds on their designed distances. Furthermore, some Hermitian self-orthogonal codes are proposed via the hulls of BCH codes and their parameters are also investigated. In addition, we determine the dimensions of the code $\mathcal {C}_{(r,r^{2}-1,\delta,1)}$ and its hull in both Hermitian and Euclidean cases for $2 \le \delta \le r^{2}-1$. We also present two sufficient and necessary conditions on designed distances such that the hull has the largest dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-orthogonal codes are an interesting type of linear codes due to their wide applications in communication and cryptography. It is known that self-orthogonal codes are often used to construct quantum error-correcting codes, which can protect quantum information in quantum computations and quantum communications. Let $\mathcal C$ be an $[n, k]$ cyclic code over $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ , where $\mathbb {F}_{q}$ is the finite field of order $q$. The hull of $\mathcal C$ is defined to be the intersection of the code and its dual. In this paper, we will employ the defining sets of cyclic codes to present two general characterizations of the hulls that have dimension $k-1$ or $k^\perp -1$ , where $k^\perp $ is the dimension of the dual code $\mathcal C^\perp $. Several sufficient and necessary conditions for primitive and projective BCH codes to have $(k-1)$ -dimensional (or $(k^\perp -1)$ -dimensional) hulls are also developed by presenting lower and upper bounds on their designed distances. Furthermore, several classes of self-orthogonal codes are proposed via the hulls of BCH codes and their parameters are also investigated. The dimensions and minimum distances of some self-orthogonal codes are determined explicitly. In addition, several optimal codes are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimal linear codes have significant applications in secret sharing schemes and secure two-party computation. There are several methods to construct linear codes, one of which is based on functions over finite fields. Recently, many construction methods for linear codes from functions have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we generalize the recent construction methods given by Tang et al. in [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 62(3), 1166-1176, 2016] to weakly regular plateaued functions over finite fields of odd characteristic. We first construct three-weight linear codes from weakly regular plateaued functions based on the second generic construction and then determine their weight distributions. We also give a punctured version and subcode of each constructed code. We note that they may be (almost) optimal codes and can be directly employed to obtain (democratic) secret sharing schemes, which have diverse applications in the industry. We next observe that the constructed codes are minimal for almost all cases and finally describe the access structures of the secret sharing schemes based on their dual codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BCH codes with efficient encoding and decoding algorithms have many applications in communications, cryptography and combinatorial design. This paper studies a class of linear codes of length q m - 1 2 over F q with special trace representation, where q is an odd prime power. With the help of the inner distributions of some subsets of association schemes of quadratic forms, we determine the weight enumerators of these codes. Determining some cyclotomic coset leaders δ i of cyclotomic cosets modulo q m - 1 2 , we prove that narrow-sense BCH codes of length q m - 1 2 with designed distance δ i = q m - q m - 1 2 - 1 - q ⌊ m - 3 2 ⌋ + i - 1 2 have the corresponding trace representation, and have the minimal distance d = δ i and the Bose distance d B = δ i , where 1 ≤ i ≤ ⌊ m + 11 6 ⌋ . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes with few weights have applications in secret sharing schemes, authentication codes, association schemes and strongly regular graphs. In this paper, we introduce a new flexible defining set, and consequently, we obtain several classes of t -weight linear codes over F p , where t = 4 , 5 , 6 and p is an odd prime. The parameters and weight distributions of the generated linear codes are fully determined using quadratic Gauss sums over finite fields. Moreover, two classes of optimal two-weight codes meeting the Griesmer bound are obtained from our constructions. Our results are heavily based on evaluating some exponential sums over finite fields. Computer experiments using MAGMA programs show that many (almost) optimal codes can be derived from our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear codes over finite chain rings meeting the Griesmer bound are particularly interesting since they are closely related to minihyper in projective Hjelmslev spaces. In this paper, motivated by the nice article (Li et al., 2018 [23]), two classes of linear codes with few non-zero Hamming weights over the finite chain ring R = F q + u F q are constructed, and one of them meets the Griesmer bound over finite commutative local rings. By a Gray map, we obtain that the Gray images of the constructed codes over the ring R are linear codes with two weights over the finite field F q with q elements, and these codes are optimal with respect to the well-known Griesmer bound under certain conditions. Our results give an affirmative answer to two (related) open questions raised in the article mentioned above. Remarkably, some of the constructed linear codes over R presented in this paper correspond to minihypers in projective Hjelmslev spaces over finite chain rings. Besides, their Gray images can be used to construct secret sharing schemes with nice access structures and other applications thanks to the minimality property that possesses our constructed codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]