Image Cryptography with Chaos: A Survey of Existing Methods and a Proposed Implementation Incorporating Fluid Dynamics Approaches

Abstract

Cryptography has uses in everyday applications ranging from e-commerce transactions to secure communications. There is current research in encrypting images in their native two dimensional form. To do this, deterministic chaos maps have been explored for their use in providing the operations required to transform a plaintext image into a ciphertext encrypted image and vice versa. This research implements existing bio-inspired and cellular automata image encryption techniques and shows that the bio-inspired approach is better than the cellular automata approach. A weakness in the cellular automata approach is also highlighted that was previously undiscovered. This research also explores a novel application of analogies from the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics to generate deterministic chaos. A cryptanalysis GUI was developed to quantitatively show that the proposed technique is superior to both the bio-inspired and cellular automata techniques using metrics including luminance histograms, pixel covariant dependence, chi-squared tests, and information entropy.