New lightweight conditional encryption schemes for multimedia

Abstract

The unprecedented advancement in multimedia technology and the upsurge of social networking as an indispensable part of day to day life, has brought forth an unimaginable necessitate for voluminous data transfer over inherently insecure networks. Besides security, another major aspect today is to design lightweight encryption schemes which can perform effectively on handheld devices like mobiles and provide security as per the requirements of the applications. The standard encryption schemes address the security aspect of only plain textual data and are not suitable for securing voluminous real-time data transfers, having significant level of redundancies, over resource-constrained environments. Focusing on this requirement introduced as the need of the hour, the paper proposes novel lightweight encryption schemes, based on conditional approach, using simple S-Box look-ups, shifting, negation and XORing (standard Exclusive OR) as the basic building blocks. To address the issue of significant redundancy present in the plain text, pixel position has been introduced as one of the parameters in the encryption process. The results of empirical analysis demonstrate the strength of the proposed schemes and they perform equally well for worst case scenarios (white image). The comparative results demonstrate complete removal of redundancies in the proposed cipher with much higher computational efficiency as compared to the standard schemes like AES.