An extendable key space integer image-cipher using 4-bit piece-wise linear cat map

Abstract

This paper presents a multiplierless image-cipher, with extendable 2048-bit key-space, based on a 4-dimensional (4D) quantized piece-wise linear cat map (PWLCM). The quantized PWLCM exhibits limit-cycles of 4-bit encoded integers with periods greater than 107. The synthesis of the PWLCM in a finite state space allows to eliminate the undesirable finite precision effect due to the hardware realization. The proposed image-cipher combines chaos, modular arithmetic, and lattice-based cryptography to encrypt a color image by performing pixel permutation and diffusion in a single operation. Further, an image-dependent confusion operation based on an 8-bit 2D-PWLCM is performed on the whole image to enhance security.