Abstract
With the rapid growth of image transmission and storage, image security has become a hot topic in the community of information security. Image encryption is a direct way to ensure image security. This paper presents a novel approach that uses a hyperchaotic system, Pixel-level Filtering with kernels of variable shapes and parameters, and DNA-level Diffusion, so-called PFDD, for image encryption. The PFDD totally consists of four stages. First, a hyperchaotic system is applied to generating hyperchaotic sequences for the purpose of subsequent operations. Second, dynamic filtering is performed on pixels to change the pixel values. To increase the diversity of filtering, kernels with variable shapes and parameters determined by the hyperchaotic sequences are used. Third, a global bit-level scrambling is conducted to change the values and positions of pixels simultaneously. The bit stream is then encoded into DNA-level data. Finally, a novel DNA-level diffusion scheme is proposed to further change the image values. We tested the proposed PFDD with 15 publicly accessible images with different sizes, and the results demonstrate that the PFDD is capable of achieving state-of-the-art results in terms of the evaluation criteria, indicating that the PFDD is very effective for image encryption.
Highlights
Images carry rich and direct information that is easy to perceive for the human visual system.In some specific fields, such as military, security, medical fields, and so on, it is very important to prevent image content from leaking
The main novelty of the PFDD is two-fold: (1) we propose a novel filtering operation for image encryption, which uses variable kernel shapes and kernel parameters determined by hyperchaotic sequence; and (2) we propose a DNA-level diffusion scheme to further change the values of images
In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed PFDD, some state-of-the-art encryption schemes were used for comparison, such as image encryption using pixel-level diffusion with dynamic filtering and DNA-level permutation with 3D Latin cubes (DFDLC) [10], image encryption with a hyperchaotic system and DNA computing (HCDNA) [33], ciphertext diffusion in a crisscross pattern (CDCP) [34], and IC-BSIF [39]
Summary
Images carry rich and direct information that is easy to perceive for the human visual system. (1) we propose a novel filtering operation for image encryption, which uses variable kernel shapes and kernel parameters determined by hyperchaotic sequence; and (2) we propose a DNA-level diffusion scheme to further change the values of images. The main advantages of the PFDD are three aspects: (1) permutation or diffusion is conducted with different-levels of data (pixel-level, bit-level, and DNA-level), improving the effectiveness of the PFDD; (2) a novel pixel-level filtering strategy with different kernel types and parameters determined by hyperchaotic sequences increases the diversity of kernels and enhances the security of the PFDD; and (3) the DNA-level diffusion is able to expand a tiny change in a plain image to the whole cipher image to resist differential attacks very well.
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