CFB-Then-ECB Mode-Based Image Encryption for an Efficient Correction of Noisy Encrypted Images

During the last few decades, the transmission of images over secure networks has exponentially grown. Data security in certain applications such as secure storage, authentication or privacy protection on cloud platforms, require specific strategies for multimedia. Cryptography can be used for this purpose. Indeed, using a secret key, it is possible to make data unreadable in order to secure it. Although encryption approaches are effective to make the original data unreadable, they are also very sensitive to noise. Because of the introduction of noise into an encrypted image during its transmission or storage, the original data cannot be recovered. In this article, we first describe a new encryption mode called CFB-then-ECB and based on a combination of the CFB mode and the ECB mode for AES encryption. Using this new encryption mode, if one encrypted pixel block is noised, this will result in two incorrectly reconstructed pixel blocks during the decryption (the current and the following pixel blocks). This noise spreading is then exploited in a new proposed approach of noisy encrypted image correction. It contains two main steps involving a classifier to discriminate clear and encrypted pixel blocks. After a direct decryption of a noisy encrypted image, the first step is to identify and localize the pixel blocks that are probably incorrectly decrypted. The second step of our proposed approach is to analyze and correct these pixel blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to blindly correct noisy encrypted images, while preserving the image structure without increasing the original data size with additional information.