Differential evolution optimization of intertwining logistic map-DNA based image encryption technique

The present scenario of the medical field is that sending the healthcare images through the internet is so far exposed to security threats. Hence, there is a need for an efficient and secure procedure to exchange healthcare images over the Internet. The Digital Image and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) provides security features for image header information but not for the pixel information. Hence to send the pixel information in a highly secured manner, the pixels need to be encrypted by using a suitable encryption algorithm. The number of pixel changing rate (NPCR) and the unified averaged changed intensity (UACI) are well-known encryption evaluation metrics to analyse the differential attack in image encryption. These two values are used to calculate the average number of pixel changes and intensity changes between two encrypted images before and after modifying any one pixel in a plaintext image respectively. If these two values are high, then the image encryption can resist the differential attacks. In this paper, a theoretical value of NPCR and UACI are computed for DICOM image encryption concerning different significant levels. An encryption algorithm with Gould transform, RC5, logistic map and DNA Diffusion is proposed for DICOM image to increase the NPCR, and UACI value and this method offered an efficient security strategy for DICOM pixel information. Finally, the computed theoretical value of NPCR and UACI are compared with the existing and proposed algorithm.

The widespread use of images, especially color images and rapid advancement of computer science, have led to an emphasis on securing these images and defending them against intruders. One of the most popular ways to protect images is to use encryption algorithms that convert data in a way that is not recognized by someone other than the intended user. The Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES) is one of the most protected encryption algorithms. However, due to various types of theoretical and practical assaults, like a statistical attack, differential analysis, and brute force attack, its security is under attack.
 In this paper, a modified AES coined as (M-AES) is proposed to improve the efficiency of the AES algorithm by increasing the algorithm's security to make the algorithm more suitable for color image encryption, and make it more resistant to many attacks. The modification is conducted on ShiftRows transformation of the original AES algorithm. To test the efficiency of the proposed M-AES algorithm, several images are drawn from the Signal and Image Processing Institute's (SIPI) image dataset. Moreover, the Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Entropy (H), Correlation Coefficient (CC), visual evaluation of histogram, Number of Pixels Change Rate (NPCR) and Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI) are used as an evaluation metric. The results show that proposed modification to the AES algorithm makes the algorithm more appropriate to image and surpasses the original AES. 
 The modification is conducted on ShiftRows step of the original AES algorithm. To test the efficiency of the proposed M-AES algorithm, several images are drawn from the signal and image processing institute's (SIPI) image dataset. Moreover, the mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), entropy (H), correlation coefficient (CC), visual evaluation of histogram, number of pixels change rate (NPCR) and unified average changing intensity (UACI) are used as an evaluation metrics. The results show that the suggested modification to AES makes it's more appropriate to the image and surpasses the original AES.

In this paper, an efficient and low‐cost cryptographic system for highly secure image encryption is presented. The proposed image encryption structure is implemented based on the key processing (KP) stage, the processing of the input image (PII) stage, and the round function (KPPII‐RF). The key processing stage and the processing of the input image stage are used to increase key sensitivity and plain‐image sensitivity, respectively. The method is independent of the input image and the bit pattern of the main key, and no information is affected by the main key and the original image. In the proposed method, three parameters, the main key, the counter value, and the previously generated ciphertext, are utilized within the encryption process to produce each subsequent ciphertext. Because this method uses the previous ciphertext to generate the next ciphertext, it increases the confusion of the final result and provides better security against differential attacks. The most important innovations of this work include the simultaneous use of various techniques such as shuffling key bits by the key processing unit, shuffling pixels of the original image by the original image processing unit, utilizing a parameter known as a seed as a unique parameter for an image, and employing an appropriate round function to apply complexity to the data. The performance of the proposed structure is evaluated based on different security analyses. The information entropy values of the encrypted images based on the proposed scheme are higher than 7.995, while correlation values are very close to zero. Furthermore, the number of pixel change rate (NPCR) and unified average change intensity (UACI) for the proposed KPPII‐RF image encryption are higher than 99.5% and 33.3, respectively. The KPPII‐RF image encryption is verified for randomness through 16 NIST benchmark statistical tests from the NIST SP 800‐22 suite. The proposed structure provides an acceptable security level for image encryption.

The security of information and digital images has become a major issue during the last three decades. A large number of algorithms for data and image encryptions are reported in the literature. However, many of the proposed algorithms are not suitable in the fields of application, because they are cryptographically weak. In the present work, a novel algorithm for encoding digital images by using a circle map with 3 parameters has been proposed. In this article different images are used for testing the validity of the proposed algorithm. The algorithm has increased the strength of security of the image encryption against cipher-text-only, chosen-plaintext and chosen-cipher-text attacks. The analysis of cryptographic strength has also been performed to confirm the fact. The results of several experimental tests, such as, key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis and statistical analysis show that the proposed algorithm for image cryptosystems provides an efficient and secure way for image encryption. A comparison in terms of correlation between the initial and transformed images, number of pixels change rate (NPCR) and unified average changing intensity (UACI) is also done. Keywords: Circle map, Chaos, Lyapunov exponent, anti-differential attack, NPCR, UACI.

RC6 is considered one of the encryption strategies being utilized and modified to be suited for image protection. However, the RC6 encryption algorithm is still prone to statistical and differential attack which is one of the major concerns whenever open networks are to be used. In this paper, we proposed a modification of RC6 algorithm for image encryption. A new technique of permutation-diffusion architecture based on a modified concept of cyclic shift is integrated to increase the degree of permutation and diffusion mechanism of RC6 for image encryption. The security level, processing time and diffusion rate were tested using image evaluation metrics such as correlation coefficient test, number of pixel change rate (NPCR) test, unified average change intensity (UACI) test, and run-time analysis to measure its efficiency along with the simulation process. Results show that the proposed method illustrates a lower value of correlation among pixels and higher value of NPCR and UACI which makes the proposed method highly resistant to statistical and differential attacks. Increased security level with minimal time consumption is achieved in our approach.

In this paper, the quality of image encryption using filter bank with lifting scheme has been studied and evaluated. Many extensive techniques have been applied to examine the security of the image encryption using the filter bank cipher with one or two rounds. To analyze and evaluate the proposed scheme, many parameters have been employed, such as, histogram analysis, correlation coefficient, global entropy, block entropy, avalanche effect, number of pixel change rate (NPCR), unified average change intensity (UACI), compression friendliness, exhaustive key analysis, and key sensitivity test. The simulation results showed that, the quality of the image encryption passes all these tests. Moreover, it reaches or excels the current state-of-the-arts. So that, the proposed image encryption process produces random-like output from the statistical point of views.

ABSTRACTRecently, in chaotic cryptography several new techniques have been suggested to develop efficient and secure image encryption algorithm for communication of image over insecure/public channels. Some of these techniques are computationally less complex but fails to provide sufficient security, and some techniques are though highly secured but increases computational overhead for encryption and decryption. This paper presents an efficient bit-plane encryption algorithm using chaotic, quadratic, and cubic maps. The proposed algorithm is based on the confusion, diffusion, and pixel randomisation processes. The encryption security of this technique for different bit-plane has been tested through key space analysis, statistical analysis, entropy analysis, and sensitivity analysis for real time image encryption and transmission. The presented algorithm shows the strength of security in terms of information entropy, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), number of pixels change rate (NPCR), unified average changing intensity (UACI), and correlation coefficient with the number of encrypted bit planes. It is clear that the strength of security increases with the number of encrypted bit planes, but the presented results demand that the level of security reached to the requirements (expected theoretically according to [C. Fu, et al., Optic Express, 20, 2363–78, Jan. 2012]) after encryption of four to six bit planes with reasonable small encryption/decryption time. This features proved the novelty of the proposed work. The algorithm is tested by the random and pseudo-random sequence of test standard SP 8000-22 released by National Institute of Standard and Technology Commission (NIST).

Secure image transmission is one of the most challenging problems in the age of communication technology. Millions of people use and transfer images for either personal or commercial purposes over the internet. One way of achieving secure image transmission over the network is encryption techniques that convert the original image into a non-understandable or scrambled form, called a cipher image, so that even if the attacker gets access to the cipher they would not be able to retrieve the original image. In this study, chaos-based image encryption and block cipher techniques are implemented and analyzed for image encryption. Arnold cat map in combination with a logistic map are used as native chaotic and hybrid chaotic approaches respectively whereas advanced encryption standard (AES) is used as a block cipher approach. The chaotic and AES methods are applied to encrypt images and are subjected to measures of different performance parameters such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), number of pixels change rate (NPCR), unified average changing intensity (UACI), and histogram and computation time analysis to measure the strength of each algorithm. The results show that the hybrid chaotic map has better NPCR and UACI values which makes it more robust to differential attacks or chosen plain text attacks. The Arnold cat map is computationally efficient in comparison to the other two approaches. However, AES has a lower PSNR value (7.53 to 11.93) and has more variation between histograms of original and cipher images, thereby indicating that it is more resistant to statistical attacks than the other two approaches.

A wrist-based photoplethysmography (PPG) tool offers a simple and non-invasive approach for applications in vital sign monitoring and healthcare. However, in a telecare network, these physiological signals ensure the authorisation demands for the domain of medical applications. Hence, this study proposes an intelligent method for PPG signal encryption and decryption. This method combines chaotic map and radial basis function network (RBFN) into symmetric cryptography with an adaptive scheme. The sine-power chaotic map is used as a key generator of 256 non-ordered numbers (key space) to set the private cipher codes. Two RBFNs are used to train an encryptor and a decryptor with the authorised cipher codes. Its substitution-based infosecurity scheme can change the numerical values of PPG raw data for each encrypted communication, and the decrypted PPG data are further applied for time- and frequency-domain analyses in clinical applications, such as heart and respiration rate analysis and arterial stiffness and upper extremity vascular disease evaluations. Through experimental results, the security levels are validated using the number of pixel change rate (NPCR), unified averaged changed intensity (UACI), and correlation analysis. The average NPCR, UACI, and correlation coefficient (CC) are 96.57%, 35.43%, and 0.005, respectively, between the plain PPG and the encrypted PPG data against hacker attacks. The larger-the-better of NPCR and UACI indexes and the smaller-the-better of CC index are obtained to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed cryptography method. The encrypted PPG also guarantees physiological signals of good quality in clinical applications. In addition, the performance of RBFN-based method is superior in adaptive learning capability than that of the traditional learning method in real-time applications.

Chaotic maps used to shuffle and manipulate the image pixels are important for image encryption (IE). In this study, a novel 2D optimized chaotic map (OPMAP) using a triple-objective differential evolution (TODE) algorithm is presented for IE. A model for OPMAP with eight decision variables is empirically designed, and then its variables are determined utilizing TODE through minimizing a triple-objective function that involving Lyapunov exponent (LE), entropy and 0–1 test. OPMAP is assessed with respect to credible measurements like bifurcation, 3D phase space, LE, 0–1 test, permutation entropy (PE) and sample entropy (SE). The capability of OPMAP is then verified through an IE scheme including permutation and diffusion through various cryptanalyses: key space 2298, mean entropy 7.9995, mean correlation 13.61E-5, number of pixels changing rate (NPCR) 99.6093, unified average changing intensity (UACI) 33.4630 and encryption processing time (EPT) 0.2919 (s). A detailed review of IE schemes reported elsewhere is presented and IE performance of OPMAP is also validated by comparison with those IE schemes with and without optimization used. The 2D-OPMAP-based IE is faster and has low computational complexity. Moreover, the proposed it shows better cryptanalysis results for the most of the comparisons.

In this paper, a cryptosystem is proposed to encrypt 16-bit monochrome DICOM image using enhanced chaotic economic map. A new enhanced chaotic economic map (ECEM) is designed from the chaotic economic map which has better bifurcation nature and positive Lyapunov exponent values. In order to improve the sternness of the encryption algorithm, the enhanced chaotic map is employed to generate the pixel permutation, masking, and swapping sequences. The substitution operation is introduced in-between the standard permutation and diffusion operations. The robustness of the proposed image encryption algorithm is measured by various analyses such as histogram, key sensitivity, key space, number of pixel change rate (NPCR), unified average change intensity (UACI), information entropy and correlation coefficient. The results of the security analyses are compared with existing algorithms to validate that the proposed algorithm is better in terms of larger key space to resist brute force attacks and other common attacks on encryption.

In the last decade, the communication of images through the internet has increased. Due to the growing demands for data transfer through images, protection of data and safe communication is very important. For this purpose, many encryption techniques have been designed and developed. New and secured encryption schemes based on chaos theory have introduced methods for secure as well as fast communication. A modified image encryption process is proposed in this work with chaotic maps and orthogonal matrix in Hill cipher. Image encryption involves three phases. In the first phase, a chaotic Henon map is used for permuting the digital image. In the second phase, a Hill cipher is used whose encryption key is generated by an orthogonal matrix which further is produced from the equation of the plane. In the third phase, a sequence is generated by a chaotic tent map which is later XORed. Chaotic maps play an important role in the encryption process. To deal with the issues of fast and highly secured image processing, the prominent properties of non-periodical movement and non-convergence of chaotic theory play an important role. The proposed scheme is resistant to different attacks on the cipher image. Different tests have been applied to evaluate the proposed technique. The results of the tests such as key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis, and information entropy, histogram correlation of the adjacent pixels, number of pixel change rate (NPCR), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and unified average changing intensity (UCAI) showed that our proposed scheme is an efficient encryption technique. The proposed approach is also compared with some state-of-the-art image encryption techniques. In the view of statistical analysis, we claim that our proposed encryption algorithm is secured.

Cancelable biometric techniques play a vital role in the privacy and security of remote surveillance systems to keep the genuine users’ confidential data safe and away from intruders. This research presents an efficient cancelable biometric framework by exploiting an irreversible hybrid encryption technique that incorporates Deoxyribonucleic, Ribonucleic acid sequences (DNA and RNA), and the evolutionary optimization technique of the Genetic Algorithm (GA). So, these techniques are employed to create completely deformed templates from their original ones. Thus, our main contribution is offering a novel biometric security framework that achieves unique randomness characteristics using RNA and DNA sequences and the evolutionary GA-based encryption scheme. The proposed framework produces an entirely unrecognized biometric template by ciphering the main discriminative features of the biometric traits of the authorized clients. The proposed algorithm is first initialized by creating several encrypted biometric images of the original users by employing the logistic map function. Secondly, the initialized encrypted images are transformed into one vector of a binary array. Then, they are converted to their corresponding introns, exons, and consequently, their relevant codons are stored in the cloud database. Thirdly, these relevant codons are replaced by new ones after generating encrypted RNA lists. The utilized encryption key is extracted from the original biometric image after utilizing excessive permutations between its pixels. Then, the GA-based optimization technique is applied to select the most convenient biometric features. Finally, after employing the GA-based cross-over and mutation operations, the chosen features are used to generate the cancelable biometric traits. To validate the security efficacy of the proposed framework, different six biometric databases are used, which are Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) Faces (gray), CASIA v.5 Faces (color), UPOL Iris (gray), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi) Ear (color and gray), Fingerprint, and CASIA Palmprint (color and gray). The security performance of the proposed framework is compared to those of recent studies in this field, such as OSH (Optical Scanning Holography) and DRPE (Double Random Phase Encoding). The simulation results prove the superior performance of the proposed framework in terms of all tested evaluation metrics. The proposed framework provides high AROC (Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic) that reaches 0.9990, low FAR (False Acceptance Rate) of 0.0015, more uniform histograms, high correlation values for genuine users, and complete hidden of biometric features. In addition, from a security perspective, the proposed framework accomplishes good entropy, UACI (unified average changing intensity), and NPCR (number of pixels change rate) values that reach 7.9960, 33.55%, and 99.65%, respectively.

Image encryption is an evolving technique in the arena of data communication. In the last decade, many encryption schemes have been suggested. Unfortunately, most of the current schemes are unable to maintain a balance between security and computational complexity. To overcome this challenge, this paper introduces a novel encryption scheme that effectively maintains the trade-off between security and computational complexity. Initially, the plain image is randomized and scrambled by the Logistic map and Arnold’s scrambling technique. The intermediate image found above, is then encrypted by the special word-oriented feedback shift register (wfsr) to get the final cipher image. Wfsr is inherently suitable for high-quality pseudorandom number generation with good statistical properties. It usually posses high throughput. Further, the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) is used for sharing the keys required for encryption and decryption process. The performance of the proposed cryptosystem is evaluated based on several statistical properties of the cipher image, the resistance of the cipher image to various attacks, and time required for encryption and key sharing process. The statistical properties of the encrypted image are found out through histogram analysis, correlation and entropy finding, key sensitivity analysis, chi-square test, and NIST randomness test. The resistance of the encrypted image to various attacks is either found out experimentally or indirectly by using metrics like Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), Number of Pixel Changing Rate (NPCR). The proposed encryption method compares favorably with similar image encryption schemes.

Medical images are regarded as important and sensitive data in the medical informatics systems. For transferring medical images over an insecure network, developing a secure encryption algorithm is necessary. Among the three main properties of security services (i.e., confidentiality, integrity, and availability), the confidentiality is the most essential feature for exchanging medical images among physicians. The Goldreich Goldwasser Halevi (GGH) algorithm can be a good choice for encrypting medical images as both the algorithm and sensitive data are represented by numeric matrices. Additionally, the GGH algorithm does not increase the size of the image and hence, its complexity will remain as simple as O(n2). However, one of the disadvantages of using the GGH algorithm is the Chosen Cipher Text attack. In our strategy, this shortcoming of GGH algorithm has been taken in to consideration and has been improved by applying the padding (i.e., snail tour XORing), before the GGH encryption process. For evaluating their performances, three measurement criteria are considered including (i) Number of Pixels Change Rate (NPCR), (ii) Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), and (iii) Avalanche effect. The results on three different sizes of images showed that padding GGH approach has improved UACI, NPCR, and Avalanche by almost 100%, 35%, and 45%, respectively, in comparison to the standard GGH algorithm. Also, the outcomes will make the padding GGH resist against the cipher text, the chosen cipher text, and the statistical attacks. Furthermore, increasing the avalanche effect of more than 50% is a promising achievement in comparison to the increased complexities of the proposed method in terms of encryption and decryption processes.