An efficient chaotic image encryption based on alternate circular S-boxes

A novel and efficient image encryption algorithm based on chaos and multiple S-boxes is proposed in this paper, in which a set of S-boxes is initially constructed using a chaotic system, and each of the S-boxes is considered as a circular sequence with a head pointer. For each image pixel, an S-box is chosen from the set of S-boxes and used to substitute for the plain pixel to get a cipher pixel, and then the chosen S-box is updated by moving its head pointer forward according to the cipher pixel and a random number. In order to increase the plaintext sensitivity of encryption, the substitution processes are performed in forward direction and backward direction, respectively. This scheme not only offers the high security by employing two directional substitutions and using the different S-boxes for each pixel but also achieves high encryption speed by constructing only a few S-boxes and updating the S-box dynamically and easily. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using a variety of analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed image encryption algorithm is secure and efficient.