A robustness-improved image encryption scheme utilizing Life-liked cellular automaton

Abstract

Image encryption is considered as an effective method to protect image against revealing. As a discrete dynamic system, the Life-liked cellular automaton (CA) has good chaotic performance and has been applied for image encryption. This paper proposes a robust block encryption scheme, based on reversible Life-liked CA with balanced rule. The proposed method adopts classic confusion–diffusion structure on block level and reversible Life-liked CA within block. An effect permutation method is developed to reduce the iteration rounds of whole system, while the diffusion module adopts reversible Life-liked CA with balanced rule to encrypt the blocks to noise-like ones. Performance analyses show the proposed scheme have good cryptographic features, satisfactory security for defeating common attacks and robustness to resist data loss and random noise.