A fast chaos-based symmetric image cryptosystem with an improved diffusion scheme

In recent years, a number of chaos-based image cryptosystems have been proposed to meet the increasing demand for real-time secure image transmission. In this paper, an improved diffusion scheme named continuous diffusion strategy is proposed to promote the efficiency of the conventional permutation–diffusion type image cipher. The new scheme contains a supplementary diffusion procedure after the conventional diffusion process and the control parameters are altered by the cipher image after the first diffusion procedure. As a result, the difference can be introduced at the beginning and spread out to the whole image, and hence the same level of security can be achieved with fewer overall rounds. Moreover, to further enhance the confusion effect of the diffusion operation, an intensive diffusion approach is proposed, using stretched key stream elements to perform a cyclic shift to the cipher pixels. Extensive cryptanalysis has been performed using differential analysis, key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis and various statistical analyses. Experiment results demonstrate that the new scheme has a high level of security and fast encryption speed for practical image encryption.