An intertwining chaotic maps based image encryption scheme

Abstract

In this paper, a new image encryption scheme is proposed that uses intertwining chaotic maps to enhance security and key length. In the substitution process, six randomly chosen odd integers are used to permute and then XORed with the first chaotic key to shuffle and alter the image pixels. Byte substitution has also been applied and the resultant values are XORed with the second chaotic key to improve the security against the known/chosen-plain text attack and to increase nonlinearity. In the diffusion process, the pixel values are altered sequentially with various operations which include nonlinear diffusion using the first chaotic key, subdiagonal diffusion of adjacent pixels and XORing with the third chaotic key. The security and performance of the proposed image encryption technique have been analyzed using statistical analysis, sensitivity analysis, key space analysis, differential analysis, and entropy analysis. The simulation shows that a single bit of key or pixel difference of the plain-image will change almost all the pixels in the cipher-image (\(\mathrm{NPCR}>99.63\) %), and the unified average changing intensity is high (\(\mathrm{UACI}>33.43\) %). Since the entropy is found to be close to the theoretical value, we observed that the information leakage is negligible, and hence the scheme is highly secure. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is secure and fast.