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Breaking a chaotic image encryption algorithm

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Abstract

Image encryption is an important issue in information security. Due to sensitivity to initial values, randomness and simple computation, chaos-based image encryption algorithms efficiently provide security. In a recent paper a chaos-based image encryption was proposed that employs genetic algorithm to optimize correlation between adjacent pixels. We show via simulations a security exploit that can find the key and decrypt the image. To fix the the aforementioned vulnerability we harness Knuth shuffle where we replace the rand function with the logistic map. We then evaluate the security of our proposed algorithm by testing the impact of several attacks on it. We show that while improving the security, our algorithm keeps the same level of pixel entropy as the previous method. Moreover, the correlation coefficient among adjacent pixels of the cipher image was reduced by an order of magnitude.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Babaol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran

    Saeed Noshadian, Ata Ebrahimzade & Seyed Javad Kazemitabar

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  1. Saeed Noshadian
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  2. Ata Ebrahimzade
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  3. Seyed Javad Kazemitabar
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Correspondence to Seyed Javad Kazemitabar.

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Noshadian, S., Ebrahimzade, A. & Kazemitabar, S.J. Breaking a chaotic image encryption algorithm. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 25635–25655 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09233-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09233-6

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