Dynamical Properties of Ion-Acoustic Waves in Space Plasma and Its Application to Image Encryption

The nonlinear ion-acoustic waves (IAWs) in a space plasma are capable of exhibiting chaotic dynamics which can be applied to cryptography. Dynamical properties of IAWs are examined using the direct method in plasmas composed of positive and negative ions and nonextensive distributed electrons. Applying the wave transformation, the governing equations are deduced into a dynamical system (DS). Supernonlinear and nonlinear periodic IAWs are presented through phase plane analysis. The analytical periodic wave solution for IAW is obtained. Under the influence of an external periodic force, the DS is transformed to a perturbed system. The perturbed DS describes multistability property of IAWs with change of initial conditions. The multistability behavior features coexisting trajectories such as, quasiperiodic, multiperiodic and chaotic trajectories of the perturbed DS. The chaotic feature in the perturbed DS is supported by Lyapunov exponents. This interesting behavior in the windows of chaotic dynamics is exploited to design efficient encryption algorithm. First SHA-512 is used to compute the hash digest of the plain image which is then used to update the initial seed of the chaotic IAWs system. Note that SHA-512 uses one-way function to map input data to the output, consequently it is quite impossible to break the proposed encryption technique. Second DNA coding is used to confuse and diffuse the DNA version of the plain image. The diffused image follows DNA decoding process leading to the cipher image. The security performance is evaluated using some well-known metrics and results indicate that the proposed cryptosystem can resist most of existing cryptanalysis techniques. In addition complexity analysis shows the possibility of practical implementation of the proposed algorithm.