A lightweight and efficient digital image encryption using hybrid chaotic systems for wireless network applications

Abstract

Due to limited processing capabilities and other constraints of most wireless networks, many existing security algorithms do not consider the network efficiency. This is because most of these security solutions exhibit intolerable overhead and consider only securing scalar data, which are not suitable for other data types such as digital images, hence affecting the provided security level and network performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient security scheme based on chaotic algorithms to efficiently encrypt digital images. Our proposed algorithm handles digital images in two phases: Firstly, digital images are split into blocks and compressed by processing them in frequency domain instead of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) domain. The ultimate goal is to reduce their sizes to speed up the encryption process and to break the correlation among image pixel values. Secondly, 2D Logistic chaotic map is deployed in key generation, permutation, and substitution stages for image pixel shuffling and transposition. In addition, 2D Henon chaotic map is deployed to change the pixel values in the diffusion stage in order to enhance the required level of security and resist various security attacks. Security performance analysis based on standard test images shows that our proposed scheme overcomes the performance of other existing techniques.