Baptista's chaos-based cipher implemented in a field programmable gate array

In the context of the current struggle for information security and computational efficacy, this paper studies Baptista's chaos-based encryption cipher as a resource-efficient alternative to the more popular block cipher algorithms. We evaluate the cipher by encrypting different types of data - text, images and sound - and we present the analysis of cyphertext statistical distribution and obfuscation characteristics. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm on multimedia content. We present an implementation of the cipher as a digital system in a Xilinx Zynq 7000 series FPGA, and evaluate hardware resource utilization and maximum obtainable frequency. The cipher source code - Matlab simulation and the Verilog hardware description - is made available as a GIT repository. The aim of the demarche is to provide digital circuitry which may be easily integrated in a hybrid analog-digital cryptosystem which employs a dynamically changing secret key.