Abstract
The nonlinearity of a Boolean function f on $GF(2)^n$ is the minimum hamming distance between f and all affine functions on $GF(2)^n$ and it measures the ability of a cryptographic system using the functions to resist against being expressed as a set of linear equations. Finding out the exact value of the nonlinearity of given Boolean functions is not an easy problem therefore one wants to estimate the nonlinearity using extra information on given functions, or wants to find a lower bound or an upper bound on the nonlinearity. In this paper we extend the notion of auto-correlations of Boolean functions to vector Boolean functions and obtain upper bounds and a lower bound on the nonlinearity of vector Boolean functions in the context of their auto-correlations. Also we can describe avalanche characteristics of vector Boolean functions by examining the extended notion of auto-correlations.