Exploring Lightweight Encryption for Image Security using One-Dimensional Chaotic Maps

The modern era has witnessed an unprecedented surge in image data generation and dissemination. This proliferation is not solely attributed to advancements in social media and e-commerce but is also significantly driven by the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). Several IoT applications, ranging from smart cities and remote surveillance to healthcare, rely significantly on visual information. Consequently, this emphasizes an urgent need for securing the sensitive and personal information embedded within the images. The conventional secure crypto primitives, primarily designed for textual and numerical data, often fail to provide robust and resource-efficient security measures for encrypting images. Contrarily, the highly random chaotic maps exhibiting considerable unpredictability are considered suitable for encrypting images. This paper explores the application of lightweight one-dimensional chaotic maps, including Logistic, Sine, Tent, and Chebyshev maps for encrypting the images. All the encryption schemes have been comprehensively evaluated in MATLAB in terms of several performance and security metrics, such as PSNR, MSE, NPCR, UACI, entropy, and execution time requirements. The findings in the paper highlight the potential of one-dimensional chaotic maps in offering balanced, computationally efficient, and optimal security solutions for safeguarding image data for diverse applications in the realm of IoT, multimedia, and beyond.