ECiS: Encryption prior to compression for digital image security with reduced memory

Abstract

Digital images are a popular source of information and play an important role in several applications. However, the large amount of available data in the form of images causes serious security concerns. Although digital images are widely available, the storage of these images requires a large amount of data. Compression is an efficient way to reduce image size and efficiently utilize network resources. In this study, a joint encryption and compression technique, namely, ECiS, is developed to solve the two major issues with digital images outlined above. To achieve high security, we encrypt an image by using DNA, SHA-256, and a chaotic-based encryption technique. To reduce the bandwidth or storage space demand, we compress the encrypted image by using a compression technique based on zero memory set partitioned embedded block (ZM-SPECK). The strength of our ECiS technique is performing the analysis by applying several standard tests, including key analysis, statistical analysis, differential analysis, and time cost evaluation on a USC-SIPI dataset. Furthermore, the extensive evaluations on the dataset demonstrate that the proposed technique is secure and has a lower memory and encryption overhead than similar techniques.