Digital Image Encryption Using 256-Bit Advanced Encryption Standard Algorithm

Ensuring secure communication of multimedia messages is crucial for social networking and data sharing platforms. Prevention of data manipulation and theft has led to the development of various encryption techniques, but scope remains for a fast and efficient multi-media encryptor. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is mathematically one of the most complex cipher algorithms to crack and has been widely deployed in the banking sector. This paper aims to present a high throughput implementation of 256-bit AES cipher for encrypting digital images and explore its practicality in peer-to-peer communication. Preprocessing of images has been performed to make them suitable for encryption. A detailed study of the encryption results and histogram analysis has been carried out. The proposed algorithm achieved a Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 61 dB for the decrypted image. Correlation between the input and the decrypted image was found to be 0.994 while the Mean Square Error (MSE) was calculated to be 0.0030.