A Lightweight Cryptographic Solution for Enhanced Image Security

Abstract

Protecting the confidentiality of images is considered critical for all industries. Encryption stands out as the foremost protective strategy for image security. However, various image dimensions and quality concerns challenge conventional encryption methods in balancing the security objective, substantial computational resources, and image quality. This paper presents a lightweight cryptographic approach designed to match the robustness of traditional encryption schemes while minimizing the computational and time requirements to be more suitable for real-time applications and IoT environments. The proposed approach extracts the three Most Significant Bit (MSB) planes from the original image. Then, it applies a permutation on each bit plane using a chaotic logistic map to generate the key used as new indices for effective permutation of pixel locations. A set of performance metrics, such as the Correlation Coefficient (CC), Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and CPU and RAM utilization, is used in the evaluation process. The results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in terms of computational efficiency and overhead. A 2% reduction in CPU and RAM utilization and a 96% decrease in extraction time were achieved while maintaining comparable security based on MSE, PSNR, and CC to AES. This improvement in efficiency is achieved while maintaining an acceptable level of security, which makes it more suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices.