Color image encryption based on programmable complemented maximum length cellular automata and generalized 3-D chaotic cat map

Abstract

With the advent of cloud and social networking sites, information security has become a major issue. Images are the most searched, uploaded, and shared data in multimedia. However, existing encryption algorithms such as DES and AES may not be suitable for image encryption because digital images have large data size, high redundancy, and strong correlation between pixels. To overcome these problems, we propose a new color image encryption algorithm using a generalized three-dimensional chaotic cat map and a programmable complemented maximum length cellular automata (PC-MLCA) in this paper. Also we design the PC-MLCA which can be implemented by hardware and has a long period and can output a nonlinear sequence as a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). The key sequence generated by the proposed PC-MLCA changes the pixel value of the original image to an unpredictable value. And to resist noise and delete attacks we design and use a generalized chaotic cat map that can perform different modular operations to simultaneously change the pixel position of color images horizontally, vertically as well as R, G, and B color components.