| Abstract |
In the digital age, images permeate every facet of our lives, often carrying critical information for organizations, institutions, and even nation-states. Ensuring their security against unauthorized access is paramount. This research introduces a novel image encryption algorithm designed to safeguard the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive gray-scale digital images. The algorithm leverages the theory of axis-aligned bounding boxes, translating the input image into a 3D representation. Within this 3D space, two identically sized boxes are generated and assessed for overlap. If the boxes do not overlap, the pixels within them are swapped. This pixel-swapping process, guided by random numbers generated from a 5D multi-wing hyper-chaotic map, is repeated numerous times to infuse confusion into the image. To further enhance security, diffusion effects are introduced by performing an XoR operation between the confused image and random numbers provided by the piece-wise linear chaotic map. This study employs private key cryptography and utilizes four gray-scale images to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Simulation has been carried out in the Pythonic ecosystem. So, the algorithms presented in this study are designed to closely resemble Python code. Comprehensive validation metrics attest to the robustness of the cipher, achieving an information entropy of 7.99985 and a computational speed of 0.3987 seconds. These results underscore the potential of this encryption approach for practical, real-world applications. These applications span military, diplomacy & government, commerce, showbiz, industry, and social life etc. © The Author(s) 2025. |
