On the Complexity of Computing Two Nonlinearity Measures

Abstract: We study the computational complexity of two Boolean nonlinearity measures: the nonlinearity and the multiplicative complexity. We show that if one-way functions exist, no algorithm can compute the multiplicative complexity in time $2^{O(n)}$ given the truth table of length $2^n$, in fact under the same assumption it is impossible to approximate the multiplicative complexity within a factor of $(2-\epsilon)^{n/2}$. When given a circuit, the problem of determining the multiplicative complexity is in the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. For nonlinearity, we show that it is #P hard to compute given a function represented by a circuit.