A novel chaos-based bit-level permutation scheme for digital image encryption

Confidentiality is an important issue when digital images are transmitted over public networks, and encryption is the most useful technique employed for this purpose. Image encryption is somehow different from text encryption due to some inherent features of image such as bulk data capacity and high correlation among pixels, which are generally difficult to handle by conventional algorithms. Recently, chaos-based encryption has suggested a new and efficient way to deal with the intractable problems of fast and highly secure image encryption. This paper proposes a novel chaos-based bit-level permutation scheme for secure and efficient image cipher. To overcome the drawbacks of conventional permutation-only type image cipher, the proposed scheme introduced a significant diffusion effect in permutation procedure through a two-stage bit-level shuffling algorithm. The two-stage permutation operations are realized by chaotic sequence sorting algorithm and Arnold Cat map, respectively. Results of various types of analysis are interesting and indicate that the security level of the new scheme is competitive with that of permutation-diffusion type image cipher, while the computational complexity is much lower. Therefore the new scheme is a good candidate for real-time secure image communication applications.