The construction of a substitution box (S-box) with high nonlinearity and high resiliency is an important research area in cryptography. In this thesis, t-resilient nxm S-box construction methods depending on linear block codes presented in &quot / A Construction of Resilient Functions with High Nonlinearity&quot / by T. Johansson and E. Pasalic in 2000, and two years later in &quot / Linear Codes in Generalized Construction of Resilient Functions with Very High Nonlinearity&quot / by E. Pasalic and S. Maitra are compared and the former one is observed to be more promising in terms of nonlinearity. The first construction method uses a set of nonintersecting [n-d,m,t+1] linear block codes in deriving t-resilient S-boxes of nonlinearity 2^(n-1)-2^(n-d-1),where d is a parameter to be maximized for high nonlinearity. For some cases, we have found better results than the results of Johansson and Pasalic, using their construction. As a distinguished reference for nxn S-box construction methods, we study the paper &quot / Differentially Uniform Mappings for Cryptography&quot / presented by K.Nyberg in Eurocrypt 1993. One of the two constructions of this paper, i.e., the inversion mapping described by Nyberg but first noticed in 1957 by L. Carlitz and S. Uchiyama, is used in the S-box of Rijndael, which is chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard. We complete the details of some theorem and proposition proofs given by Nyberg.

S-boxes are key components of many symmetric cryptographic primitives. Among them, some block ciphers and hash functions are vulnerable to attacks based on differential cryptanalysis, a technique introduced by Biham and Shamir in the early 90’s. Resistance against attacks from this family depends on the so-called differential properties of the S-boxes used. When we consider S-boxes as functions over finite fields of characteristic 2, monomials turn out to be good candidates. In this Master’s Thesis, we study the differential properties of a particular family of monomials, namely those with exponent 2ͭᵗ-1 In particular, conjectures from Blondeau’s PhD Thesis are proved. More specifically, we derive the differential spectrum of monomials with exponent 2ͭᵗ-1 for several values of t using a method similar to the proof Blondeau et al. made of the spectrum of x -<img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Crightarrow" /> x⁷. The first two chapters of this Thesis provide the mathematical and cryptographic background necessary while the third and fourth chapters contain the proofs of the spectra we extracted and some observations which, among other things, connect this problem with the study of particular Dickson polynomials.