T-function

Article summary

In cryptography, a T-function is a bijective mapping that updates every bit of the state in a way that can be described as x_i' = x_i + f(x_0, \cdots, x_{i-1}) , or in simple words an update function in which each bit of the state is updated by a linear combination of the same bit and a function of a subset of its less significant bits. If every single less significant bit is included in the update of every bit in the state, such a T-function is called triangular. Thanks to their bijectivity (no collisions, therefore no entropy loss) regardless of the used Boolean functions and regardless of the selection of inputs (as long as they all come from one side of the output bit), T-functions are now widely used in cryptography to construct block ciphers, stream ciphers, PRNGs and hash functions. T-functions were first proposed in 2002 by A. Klimov and A. Shamir in their paper "A New Class of Invertible Mappings". Ciphers such as TSC-1, TSC-3, TSC-4, ABC, Mir-1 and VEST are built with different types of T-functions. Because arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction and multiplication are also T-functions (triangular T-functions), software-efficient word-based T-functions can be constructed by combining bitwise logic with arithmetic operations.…

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