Partially bent and plateaued functions over finite fields have significant applications in
cryptography, sequence theory, coding theory, design theory and combinatorics. They have
been extensively studied due to their various desirable cryptographic properties. In this
paper, we study on characterizations of partially bent and plateaued functions over finite
fields, with the aim of clarifying their structure. We first redefine the notion of partially bent
functions over any finite field F _q, with qa prime power, and then provide a few …