On relations between CCZ- and EA-equivalences

In the present paper we introduce some sufficient conditions and a procedure for checking whether, for a given function, CCZ-equivalence is more general than EA-equivalence together with taking inverses of permutations. It is known from Budaghyan et al. (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 52.3, 1141–1152 2006; Finite Fields Appl. 15(2), 150–159 2009) that for quadratic APN functions (both monomial and polynomial cases) CCZ-equivalence is more general. We prove hereby that for non-quadratic APN functions CCZ-equivalence can be more general (by studying the only known APN function which is CCZ-inequivalent to both power functions and quadratics). On the contrary, we prove that for power non-Gold APN functions, CCZ equivalence coincides with EA-equivalence and inverse transformation for n ≤ 8. We conjecture that this is true for any n.