Chaos based cryptosystem for still visual data

Recent years have witnessed a strong relationship between chaos and cryptography. Owing to this relationship, development in one field directly impacts the other field. High computational resources are consumed in re-designing of the complete cryptosystem due to a newly developed chaotic map. Also, the tools developed to discern chaos leads to easy cryptanalysis of chaotic cryptosystems. To save resources and overcome easy cryptanalysis, this paper proposes a spatial domain based chaotic cryptosystem that employs different chaotic maps during permutation-substitution process. Multiple iterations have been performed to achieve resistance against various cryptanalytic and error function attacks, that are specifically designed for chaos based cryptosystems. The proposed technique has been generalized and verified for different chaotic maps. A significant benefit of the proposed cryptosystem is its support for chaotic system free property, which allows replacement of an existing chaotic map with a different map at a later stage. Thorough performance, security and comparative analysis ascertains efficacy of the proposed technique.