Abstract

Today, the security of digital images is considered more and more essential and a strong secret key plays a major role in the image encryption. In this paper, a novel method for generating dynamic non-linear secret keys for a symmetric block cipher using XOR-operation is proposed. The dynamic non-linear secret keys generation is based on a combination of logistic and piecewise chaotic map methods with a new automatic creation of initial seed values. The automatic initial seed values creation depends on the development of a novel strategy for seeds creation based on sunflower spiral points. The experimental results indicate that the proposed key generator algorithm has the advantage of large key space with a safety protection of brute force attack. Therefore, the performance analysis of image encryption reveals a correlation coefficient of about (-0.0001) and entropy greater than (7.9978). Furthermore, the results show high security for encryption based on strong dynamic secret key properties.

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