Boolean Functions: Degree and Support

Abstract

In this paper we establish some properties about Boolean functions that allow us to relate their degree and their support. These properties allow us to compute the degree of a Boolean function without having to calculate its algebraic normal form. Furthermore, we introduce some linear algebra properties that allow us to obtain the degree of a Boolean function from the dimension of a linear or affine subspace. Finally we derive some algorithms and compute the average time to obtain the degree of some Boolean functions from its support.