A novel fast image encryption algorithm for embedded systems

Abstract

Nowadays, embedded systems can be found everywhere in daily life. In the development of embedded systems, data security is one of the critical factors. Encryption is an effective way to protect data from threats. Among encryption algorithms, chaos-based methods have strong cryptographic properties since chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions and parameters. However, most of these algorithms cannot be applied in practice because their encryption speed is not fast enough. In this paper, a fast image encryption algorithm is proposed. Compared with traditional chaos-based image encryption algorithms, the proposed method utilizes mixed-sequence and decorrelation operation to enhance the randomness of chaotic sequence. Moreover, it used minimum length of the sequence which is determined by experiments. Therefore, the proposed scheme spends much less computation time, which is an important advantage for being applied in practice. Testing results have shown that this algorithm has good performance in resisting known attacks, such as known-plaintext attacks, chosen ciphertext attacks, statistical attacks, differential attacks, and various brute-force attacks.