A threefold chaotic image encryption technique for efficacious image data protection

Abstract

With the profound use of digital contents in education and social media, multimedia content have become a prevalent means of communication and with such rapid increase, information security is still a major concern. This paper provides a summary of the techniques of securing image data focusing primarily on encryption. This paper additionally also explores the contribution of chaos theory in the domain of image encryption and applies a threefold chaotic map sequence to design an image encryption technique. This chaos-based encryption technique renders characteristics like sensitivity, determinacy, and ergodicity, and hence provides a better trade-off between security and computational speed. The efficacy of proposed algorithm is also evaluated based on well-known statistical metrics like Number of Changing Pixel Rate (NPCR), Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), Information Entropy, local Entropy, Correlation analysis, key sensitivity analysis, and NIST Randomness test. Furthermore, the key sensitivity analysis is also discussed which is a major part of any encryption algorithm analysis.