A symmetric color image encryption scheme based on chaotic maps

Abstract

This paper presents a permutation-diffusion architecture based symmetric color image encryption scheme. In the permutation stage, the three color components of a color image are shuffled separately by using Arnold cat map, so as to eliminate the strong correlation among adjacent pixels. Then in the diffusion stage, the shuffled R, G, B components are masked by three pseudo-randomness key streams quantified from Chen's chaotic system, respectively, with the purpose of confusing the relationship between the cipher image and plain image. Thorough security tests are carried out with detailed analysis, including the most important ones like key space analysis, statistical analysis and key sensitivity analysis, which has demonstrated the satisfactory security of the proposed scheme.