Beyond Standard Methods: A Novel Image Encryption Scheme Combining Base64, Key Hashing, and Fragmentation for Robust Protection

The growing reliance on digital images in various domains necessitates robust protection against unauthorized access and manipulation. This research proposes a novel image encryption scheme combining Base64 encoding, key hashing, and key splitting techniques to achieve enhanced security and resilience. Firstly, the image data is converted to a Base64 string, rendering it unintelligible in its raw form. Subsequently, a secret key undergoes a hashing function to generate a fixed-length digest, ensuring security through controlled encryption. This hashed key is then fragmented into multiple image sub-shares, further obfuscating its presence and hindering potential key extraction attempts. The encryption process leverages the combination of Base64 encoded data, and the derived key to scramble the image information into a cipher text. This cipher text, along with the fragmented key sub-shares, constitutes the encrypted output. Decryption involves reassembling the key fragments, applying the inverse hashing function, and utilizing the reconstructed key to reverse the encryption process, ultimately revealing the original image. This proposed scheme offers several advantages compared to the existing methods. Combining Base64 encoding with key hashing and splitting, provides multi-layered protection against unauthorized access and potential brute-force attacks. Additionally, the key fragmentation introduces spatial redundancy, enhancing resilience against partial key loss or corruption. Through rigorous security analysis and performance evaluation, the proposed scheme's robustness is demonstrated against various attacks while maintaining efficient encryption and decryption processes. This novel approach holds promising potential for securing sensitive image data in diverse applications across various fields.