Aperiodic propagation criteria for Boolean functions

We characterise the aperiodic autocorrelation for a Boolean function, f, and define the Aperiodic Propagation Criteria (APC) of degree l and order q. We establish the strong similarity between APC and the Extended Propagation Criteria (EPC) as defined by Preneel et al. in 1991, although the criteria are not identical. We also show how aperiodic autocorrelation can be related to the first derivative of f. We further propose the metric APC distance and show that quantum error correcting codes (QECCs) are natural candidates for Boolean functions with favourable APC distance.