Elementary abelian regular subgroups as hidden sums for cryptographic trapdoors

We study special subgroups of the affine general linear group acting on a vector space. To be more precise, we study elementary abelian regular sub- groups. It turns out that these have a strong cryptographic significance, since they can be exploited to insert or detect algebraic trapdoors in block ciphers. When used in this context, they take the name of hidden sums. Our results include a convenient representation of their elements, a classification of their conjugacy classes and several combinatorial counting formulas. We also show how to use hidden sums to attack a block cipher and we hint at ongoing research, where the hidden sums are studied to obtain more sophisticated algebraic attacks.