An Improved Secure Image Encryption Algorithm Based on Rubik's Cube Principle and Digital Chaotic Cipher

A recently proposed secure image encryption scheme has drawn attention to the limited security offered by chaos-based image encryption schemes (mainly due to their relatively small key space) proposing a highly robust approach, based on Rubik's cube principle. This paper aims to study a newly designed image cryptosystem that uses the Rubik's cube principle in conjunction with a digital chaotic cipher. Thus, the original image is shuffled on Rubik's cube principle (due to its proven confusion properties), and then XOR operator is applied to rows and columns of the scrambled image using a chaos-based cipher (due to its proven diffusion properties). Finally, the experimental results and security analysis show that the newly proposed image encryption scheme not only can achieve good encryption and perfect hiding ability but also can resist any cryptanalytic attacks (e.g., exhaustive attack, differential attack, statistical attack, etc.).