A novel image encryption algorithm using chaos and reversible cellular automata

•Intertwining logistic map which has complex behavior is adopted to permutation and diffusion.•The image, when processed, is treated in a lower level: bit-level.•The image encryption under reversible cellular automata can be computed in parallel.•Compared to other schemes, our scheme a higher level of security. In this paper, a novel image encryption scheme is proposed based on reversible cellular automata (RCA) combining chaos. In this algorithm, an intertwining logistic map with complex behavior and periodic boundary reversible cellular automata are used. We split each pixel of image into units of 4 bits, then adopt pseudorandom key stream generated by the intertwining logistic map to permute these units in confusion stage. And in diffusion stage, two-dimensional reversible cellular automata which are discrete dynamical systems are applied to iterate many rounds to achieve diffusion on bit-level, in which we only consider the higher 4 bits in a pixel because the higher 4 bits carry almost the information of an image. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm achieves a high security level and processes good performance against common attacks like differential attack and statistical attack. This algorithm belongs to the class of symmetric systems.