Deciphering an image cipher based on 3-cell chaotic map and biological operations

In recent years, it is popular that the combination of chaos and DNA is employed for image ciphers. There have been a great number of image ciphers which are designed based on chaos and DNA, but the corresponding cryptanalytic works are insufficient and in-depth study should be made. In this paper, we decipher an image cipher combining a 3-cell chaotic map with DNA. It was claimed that this cipher has high security and can resist different well-known attacks. However, we demonstrate that the claim is not reasonable, since the cipher can be broken by chosen plaintext attack with the complexity O ( α β ) , where α and β represent the number of the image rows and columns, respectively.