An image encryption scheme based on new spatiotemporal chaos

Spatiotemporal chaos is chaotic dynamics in spatially extended system, which has attracted much attention in the image encryption field. The spatiotemporal chaos is often created by local nonlinearity dynamics and spatial diffusion, and modeled by coupled map lattices (CML). This paper introduces a new spatiotemporal chaotic system by defining the local nonlinear map in the CML with the nonlinear chaotic algorithm (NCA) chaotic map, and proposes an image encryption scheme with the permutation-diffusion mechanism based on these chaotic maps. The encryption algorithm diffuses the plain image with the bitwise XOR operation between itself pixels, and uses the chaotic sequence generated by the NCA map to permute the pixels of the resulting image. Finally, the constructed spatiotemporal chaotic sequence is employed to diffuse the shuffled image. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed encryption scheme is of high key sensitivity and large key space. In addition, the scheme is secure enough to resist the brute-force attack, entropy attack, differential attack, chosen-plaintext attack, known-plaintext attack and statistical attack. (C) 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.