Design and FPGA Implementation of the Henon Chaotic Map for Image Encryption

Due to the ever increasing usage of multimedia content sharing and the inherent nature of the insecure links used for transmission, it is quite necessary to provide a fast and secure encryption algorithm. Current symmetric ciphers possess properties that may reveal some content of the plaintext images, especially when a block cipher is used without any chaining. Chaotic encryption has been proposed to allow for hiding inherent properties of the images and to generate almost uniform histograms of the cipher image (i.e.; hiding any visual properties). To that end, we propose the use of hardware to implement chaos-based ciphers for faster execution time. The results of this work show that such an implementation is feasible, and even favorable, when compared to software-based image encryption.