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I'm no mathematician but when thinking about block ciphers such as AES I find it much easier to think of them as a mathematical function $f$ (rather than an 'algorithm') such that $c=f(m,k)$ with $c$ the cyphertext, $m$ the plaintext and $k$ the key.

When I think about breaking such a cipher the first thing I think about is to collect a number $n$ of plaintext-ciphertext pairs so that we have a set of equations $c_{i}=f(m_{i},k)$ for $i=1..n$. Now I suppose that if $f$ is linear then we have a set of equations that can be solved. So it's easy to see that block ciphers need to introduce non-linearity to avoid this.

Are there any accessible texts that use this approach to explaining symmetric cryptography?

Mr. B
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    Non-linearity is just one of the properties that is important for a modern cipher. It therefore isn't enough to "explain" symmetric cryptography – Maarten Bodewes Mar 31 '24 at 14:07
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    Introduction to modern cryptography by Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell is one of the best books on modern cryptography. It also uses function-based thinking as a key concept, though it mainly uses other properties for the functions than linear and nonlinear. – Titanlord Mar 31 '24 at 14:10
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    What you are considering is extended into the algebraic attack where we have non-linear monomials instead of linear restriction. This idea goes back to Shannon. You can read such good examples in Bard's book – kelalaka Mar 31 '24 at 14:25
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    What is linearization attack – kelalaka Mar 31 '24 at 17:28

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