4D Hyperchaotic map and DNA encoding combined image encryption for secure communication

The usage of digital health data such as documents, images and videos has increased drastically in recent years, making them more prone to sophisticated cyber threats. Here arises a great requirement of information security since this digital data is sent through the public network. Many encryption algorithms were utilised to protect digital data from typical attacks. There exist several conventional encryption algorithms such as Data Encryption Standard (DES), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), International DataEncryption Algorithm (IDEA), etc., which are used for encryption purposes. Still, they take longer execution time, provides poor security and are more vulnerable to several cyber-attacks. The proposed work provides a cryptosystem based on 4D Lorenz type hyper-chaos and Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encoding mechanism to overcome earlier method limitations. The approximated and detailed coefficients of the input image is obtained by applying Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). Then, the pixels of the Low-Low (LL) band get permuted using a Logistic map. The 4D hyper-chaotic system creates a pseudo-random chaotic sequence using the initial values, quantised to a keystream. The final data gets encoded using the DNA encoding rule. For enhanced diffusion, DNA-XOR is performed to produce the final cipher image. Various performance metrics have been analysed for several images, and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme is effective against brute force attacks.

Automated summary

The usage of digital health data has increased drastically in recent years, leading to a greater need for information security. Conventional encryption algorithms such as DES and AES are less effective in providing sufficient security against various cyber-attacks, calling for more advanced encryption methods.