IESCA: An efficient image encryption scheme using 2-D cellular automata

In the present era of Information Technology (IT), transfer of multimedia data is happening at a rapid pace. In many Internet-of-Things (IoT) based applications, sensor devices are sending information in the form of images. However, if the IoT applications are used in the information sensitive sectors like defense, healthcare, etc., the images must be encrypted before sending to the gateway fog nodes. Again, traditional encryption algorithms will not work in such scenarios due to the resource constraint nature of IoT devices. Here, Cellular Automata (CA) plays an important role. In this paper, a new secure and efficient image encryption technique is proposed using 2-D Moore Cellular Automata (MCA), called as IESCA which is lossless and easy to implement in hardware. Cellular Automata can generate random and chaotic sequence much faster than the existing chaotic sequence generators. It uses local transformations based on one bit state values of each of its neighbors. It makes CA implementation very easy and less resource consuming. Moreover, considering Moore convention has increased the key space more than the existing CA based image ciphering techniques. The randomness of the cipher images are evaluated using DIEHARD and NIST statistical test suites. Additionally, several security and performance analyses of the IESCA have proved its robustness and resistance against security attacks. Experimental results of the IESCA show its efficiency when compared to the existing encryption techniques. The proposed scheme has achieved 2.76% improvement in terms of execution time when compared with the state-of-the-arts. Moreover, the proposed scheme has achieved 5.02% improvement in terms of NPCR and 7.69% improvement in terms of UACI values when compared with the existing schemes.

Automated summary

The paper discusses the issue of image encryption in IoT applications in sensitive sectors, proposing a new secure and efficient image encryption method based on Cellular Automata. Experimental results and performance analysis confirm the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.