A secure image encryption scheme based on a novel 2D sine–cosine cross-chaotic (SC3) map

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new 2D sine–cosine cross-chaotic (SC3) map to design an image encryption scheme with high confusion and diffusion capability. We evaluate the maximum Lyapunov exponent (MLE) of the proposed SC3 map to measure its degree of sensitivity to initial conditions and perform bifurcation analysis to find the chaotic region. The proposed chaotic map generates two pseudo-random sequence $$R_1$$ and $$R_2$$ , which are used in confusion (permutation) and diffusion phase, respectively. The confusion layer is designed by shuffling the image pixels, and the diffusion layer is designed by bitwise XOR operation. The strength of the proposed image encryption scheme is evaluated against resistance to the statistical attack (information entropy, correlation coefficient, and histogram analysis), differential attack (NPCR and UACI), and sensitivity to the secret key. The experimental results of both security and performance analysis show that the proposed image encryption scheme is secure enough to resist all the existing cryptanalytic attack and efficient in terms of encryption time.