Image Encryption
Fourth Order MCA and Chaos-based Image Encryption Scheme

Abstract
This paper presents a fast and efficient cryptosystem for enciphering digital images. It employs two of the most prominent dynamical systems-chaotic maps and cellular automata. The key streams in the proposed encryption scheme are derived from the SHA-256 hash function. Hash functions produce the digest of the input plaintext, known as hash value, which can be considered as a unique signature of the input. This makes the keys more plain text dependent, which is a desirable property of a robust cryptosystem. These key streams are used as the secret keys (i.e., initial conditions and control parameters) of an improved onedimensional (1D) chaotic map, i.e., the Logistic-Sine map. As far as we know, this work is a first that combines the well-known diffusion-confusion architecture and the fourth order 1D memory cellular automata (MCA) for image encryption. Firstly, a pixelwise XOR operation is applied to the original image, followed by a pixel-wise random permutation. The resulting image is decomposed into four blocks according to the quadtree decomposition strategy. Then a fourth order reversible MCA is applied, the blocks obtained from the quadtree decomposition are considered as the initial MCA configurations, and the transition rules are determined using the chaotic map. Performance analyses show that the proposed encryption scheme presents a high immunity against all kind of attacks while maintaining a low complexity, which outcomed a notably better performance/complexity tradeoff compared to some recently proposed image schemes.
Authors:
Md Nazish Aslam
PIRO Technologies Private Limited, New Delhi-110025, India
Akram Belazi
RISCĀ Laboratory, National Engineering School of Tunis, Tunis El Manar University, Tunis 1002, Tunisia
Sofiane Kharbech
Member IEEE, Sys’Com-ENIT (LR-99-ES21), Tunis El Manar University, Tunis 1002, Tunisia
Muhammad Talha
Member IEEE, Deanship of Scientific Research, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
Wei Xiang
Senior Member IEEE, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Cairns, Qld. 4878, Australia
Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen 518000, China