SRSS: A New Chaos-Based Single-Round Single S-Box Image Encryption Scheme for Highly Auto-Correlated Data

Shahbaz Khan, Muhammad; Ahmad, Jawad; Ali, Hisham; Pitropakis, Nikolaos; Al-Dubai, Ahmed; Ghaleb, Baraq; Buchanan, William J

Abstract

With the advent of digital communication, securing digital images during transmission and storage has become a critical concern. The traditional s-box substitution methods often fail to effectively conceal the information within highly auto-correlated regions of an image. This paper addresses the security issues presented by three prevalent S-box substitution methods, i.e., single S-box, multiple S-boxes, and multiple rounds with multiple S-boxes, especially when handling images with highly auto-correlated pixels. To resolve the addressed security issues, this paper proposes a new scheme SRSS-the Single Round Single S-Box encryption scheme. SRSS uses a single S-box for substitution in just one round to break the pixel correlations and encrypt the plaintext image effectively. Additionally, this paper introduces a new Chaos-based Random Operation Selection System-CROSS, which nullifies the requirement for multiple S-boxes, thus reducing the encryption scheme's complexity. By randomly selecting the operation to be performed on each pixel, driven by a chaotic sequence, the proposed scheme effectively scrambles even high auto-correlation areas. When compared to the substitution methods mentioned above, the proposed encryp-tion scheme exhibited exceptionally well in just a single round with a single S-box. The close-to-ideal statistical security analysis results, i.e., an entropy of 7.89 and a correlation coefficient of 0.007, validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. This research offers an innovative path forward for securing images in applications requiring low computational complexity and fast encryption and decryption speeds.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: 9th International Conference on Engineering and Emerging Technologies (IEEE ICEET 2023)
• Start Date: Oct 27, 2023
• End Date: Oct 28, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Aug 27, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jan 20, 2024
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Keywords: S-Box; chaos; image encryption; correlation; single round; single S-Box
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3488897
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/1825364/all-proceedings