Image encryption for secure Internet multimedia applications

Internet multimedia applications have become very, popular. Valuable multimedia content such as digital images, however, is vulnerable to unauthorized access while in storage and during transmission over a network. Streaming digital images also require high network bandwidth for transmission. For effective image transmission over the Internet, therefore, both security and bandwidth issues must be considered. We present a novel scheme, which combines the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for image compression and block cipher Data Encryption Standard (DES) for image encryption. The simulation results indicate that our proposed method enhances the security for image transmission over the Internet as well as improves the transmission rate.