DNA key based visual chaotic image encryption

With the exponential growth of Internet technologies, digital information exchanged over the Internet is also significantly increased. In order to ensure the security of multimedia contents over the open natured Internet, data should be encrypted. In this paper, the quantum chaotic map is utilized for random vectors generation. Initial conditions for the chaos map are computed from a DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) sequence along with plaintext image through Secure Hash Algorithm-512 (SHA-512). The first two random vectors break the correlation among pixels of the original plaintext image via row and column permutation, respectively. For the diffusion characteristics, the permuted image is bitwise XORed with a random matrix generated through the third random vectors. The diffused image is divided into Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Most Significant Bits (MSBs) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is applied to the carrier image. The HL and HH blocks of the carrier image are replaced with LSBs and MSBs of the diffused image for the generation of a visually encrypted image. The detailed theoretical analysis and experimental simulation of the designed scheme show that the proposed encryption algorithm is highly secured. Efficiency and robustness of the proposed visually image encryption scheme is also verified via a number of attack analyses, i.e., sensitivity attack analysis (> 99%), differential attack analysis (NPCR > 99, UACI > 33), brute force attack (almost 7.9892), statistical attack (correlation coefficient values are almost 0 or less than zero), noise tolerance, and cropping attack. Further security analyses such as encryption quality (ID ≅ 1564, DH = 3.000), homogeneity (0.3798), contrast (10.4820) and energy (0.0144) of the scheme are also evaluated.