Implementation of RC5 and RC6 block ciphers on digital images

With the fast evolution of the networks technology, the security becomes an important research axis. Many types of communication require the transmission of digital images. This transmission must be safe especially in applications that require a fairly high level of security such as military applications, spying, radars, and biometrics applications. Mechanisms for authentication, confidentiality, and integrity must be implemented within their community. For this reason, several cryptographic algorithms have been developed to ensure the safety and reliability of this transmission. In this paper, we investigate the encryption efficiency of RC5 and RC6 block cipher applied to digital images by including a statistical and differential analysis then, and also we investigate those two block ciphers against errors in ambient noise. The security analysis shows that RC6 algorithm is more secure than RC5. However, using RC6 to encrypt images in rough environment (low signal to noise ratio) leads to more errors (almost double of RC5) and may increase energy consumption by retransmitting erroneous packets. A compromise security/energy must be taken into account for the good choice of encryption algorithm.