A Novel RGB Image Obfuscation Technique Using Dynamically Generated All Order-4 Magic Squares

Plethora of image encryption schemes exist in literature based on the construct of magic square for realizing the purpose of image obfuscation. This magic square carries out the scrambling project of the encryption. In these schemes, normally single and static magic square is implied. To render greater scrambling effects, this study proposes a novel image encryption scheme using all order-4 magic squares whose frequency reaches to the tune of 880. These magic squares have been dynamically selected to carry out the scrambling project. As the color image is input, it is broken into its gray scale red, green and blue components. These components are joined together to make a big gray scale image. Intertwining logistic map (ILM) has been used for the generation of random data. Besides, one more stream has been created through the arithmetic manipulation of the generated three streams. Streams generated by ILM has been used to realize the effects of confusion and diffusion. First and second streams out of the four streams randomly select the address from the big gray scale image to apply the randomly selected magic square by the third stream, in order to create the scrambling effects. The fourth and last stream of random numbers is used to create the diffusion effects in the scrambled image. Plaintext senstivity has been introduced by tempering the one initial value of the chaotic system through the usage of a characteristic of the given input color image. The experimentation and security analyses sections vividly demonstrate the strength, immunity from the diverse attacks and prospects for the real world application of the proposed image cipher. In particular, we got very promising stats of information entropy (7.9974) and computational time (0.9865 seconds). No doubt, they suggest the potential application of the proposed image cipher in some real world setting.