Construction and Count of Boolean Functions of an Odd Number of Variables with Maximum Algebraic Immunity

Algebraic immunity has been proposed as an important property of Boolean functions. To resist algebraic attack, a Boolean function should possess high algebraic immunity. It is well known now that the algebraic immunity of an $n$-variable Boolean function is upper bounded by $\left\lceil {\frac{n}{2}} \right\rceil$. In this paper, for an odd integer $n$, we present a construction method which can efficiently generate a Boolean function of $n$ variables with maximum algebraic immunity, and we also show that any such function can be generated by this method. Moreover, the number of such Boolean functions is greater than $2^{2^{n-1}}$.