Design of digital image encryption based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithm and Radix-64 conversion

Abstract

The billions of bits of information are transferred each second through the internet every day. The information may be text, image, audio or video etc, accordingly, we need some protection mechanism while sharing confidential data. Generally, RSA algorithm is used for encrypting the Secret images. However, the security provided by Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is higher with lower sized key than the RSA algorithm. So, this article proposes an extended Elliptic Curve encryption approach for encrypting the secret images. In this system, the secret image is partitioned into three color image planes such as Red, Green and Blue. By applying Radix-64 encoding and Mapping table, these planes are converted into elliptic curve points and then these points are encrypted using ECC algorithm. Again, these points are applied to the Radix-64 decoding and the mapping table to get ciphered-image. At last, the key parameters such as a, b, p and Generator point (G) are embedded in the last four pixel positions of the ciphered-image. In order to get the original secret image, the recipient must extract these key parameters from the encrypted image and then apply the remaining processes to the encrypted image in the opposite order. Experimental results tested using MATLAB R2021b and it shows that the NPCR and UACI values are 99.54% and 28.73 % and better quality feature is attained since the entropy value is almost closer to eight. So, the proposed image encryption has robust capacity to fight against the differential attack.