Cryptanalysis of a chaotic key-based image encryption scheme

Abstract

Security of multimedia data is a major concern due to its widespread transmission over various communication channels. Hence, design and study of good image encryption schemes has become a major research topic. During the last few decades, there has been an increase in chaos-based cryptography. This paper proposes an attack on a recently proposed chaos-based image encryption scheme. The cryptosystem under study proceeded by first shuffling the original image to disturb the arrangement of pixels by applying a chaotic map several times. Second, a key stream is generated using Chen’s chaotic system to mix it with the shuffled pixels to finally obtain the cipher image. A chosen-ciphertext attack can be done to recover the system without any knowledge of the key. It simply demands two pairs of plaintext–ciphertext to completely break the cryptosystem.