Image enciphering based on DNA Exclusive-OR operation union with chaotic maps

A modern method for gray image enciphering depends on two techniques which are; DNA Exclusive-OR operation and 2D Chaotic Map is introduced. In preprocessing level, Arnold Transform is first applied on plain gray image for shuffling. Then, a DNA 2D matrix is resulted from encoding the shuffled gray image. Next, each of Henon Map and Ikeda Map are employed in keys generation to be used in the substitution and permutation process, respectively. The last process is decoding the resulted 2D matrix, and the enciphered image is obtained. The introduced method can acquire fine enciphering effect; has very low correlation (correlation close to zero), as well attains satisfactory entropy value close to 8, a wide secret key's space, strong sensitivity to secret key was the NPCR over 99% and UACI up to 33%, and has the abilities of resisting exhaustive attack and statistic attack as the investigational outcome and security analysis showed.